Heartbreak Hotel In 3rd Place

Heartbreak Hotel In 3rd Place



Even as the Phillies and Yankees prepare to meet in the World Series, 12 other teams spent Monday afternoon making beds in this year's World Series of Housekeeping.
The sponsoring Metropolitan Memphis Hotel & Lodging Association will use the teams' $100 registration fees on a scholarship endowment for the Kemmons Wilson School of Hospitality and Resort Management at the University of Memphis.
"Housekeepers are stuck in the trenches, so this event gets them out," said Peggy Callahan, executive director of the hotel association. "It's fun for them, and it's team building."
Each four-member team competed in skill and timed events, such as toilet paper bowling; a relay race with housekeeping carts through an obstacle course of chairs; blindfolded, big-bed make-off; and "commode snatchers" -- a basketball-style toss with rolls of toilet paper and mounted toilet seats.
In the decorative towel-folding competition, points based upon time and style were given to teams that folded towels into figures of elephants, peacocks, cats and even a hound dog. When the buzzer sounded and the flurry of white cotton stopped, the Madison Hotel won that event.
"It's an opportunity to show them (housekeeping staff) how important their job is," said Mohamad Hakimian, president & CEO of Unison Hotel Company, the management company of the Madison Hotel. "They get a big kick out of it."
Mary Calorio is general manager of Elvis Presley's Heartbreak Hotel, but stayed neutral as the president of the Metropolitan Memphis Hotel & Lodging Association. She opted instead to praise the housekeeping profession.
"Cleanliness is what makes the room, it's what the customer knows and what keeps them coming back to a hotel," Calorio said. "Housekeeping is the department that gets overlooked a lot of times and it's a pet of mine because it's where I started in the business in 1972."
The games were held in the cavernous South Hall of the Memphis Cook Convention Center, which is celebrating its busiest convention year ever with 36 meetings.
The center is gearing up for this year's influx of the Church of God In Christ convocation, the city's largest gathering of the year.
"We're happy to have our friends in the hotel business here so they can see some of the space their guests use," said Pierre Landaiche, general manager of the Convention Center. "It's also the chance for us to give back to the industry."
The Convention Center and the area's hotels have a symbiotic relationship, with 105,000 nightly hotel rooms booked this year as a result of meetings held at the center, said Landaiche.
Craig Marshall, regional director of operations for the Peabody Hotel Group and general manager of its Hampton Inn & Suites brand at Beale Street, said the shrinking economy has area hotels jockeying more for business.
"We're all competing," Marshall said, "so it's good to let our hair down and have some fun."
The participating hotel teams were the Benchmark Hotel, Crowne Plaza, Hampton Inn & Suites, Holiday Inn Select East, Memphis Grizzlies House, Residence Inn Downtown, Courtyard by Marriott Collierville, Elvis Presley's Heartbreak Hotel, Hilton Garden Inn Southhaven, the Madison Hotel, Memphis Marriott Downtown and the Peabody Hotel.
World Series of Housekeeping
Winner: Memphis Grizzlies House
Second place: Crowne Plaza
Third place: Elvis Presley's Heartbreak Hotel

Source: Elvis Unlimited, 27-10-2009