plenary ‘A Wild and Emerging Industry’ WHAT’S YOUR STORY?
Paul Astleford
Digging In Paul Astleford (left) and Hilton Worldwide’s Ted Ratcliff break ground on the Hilton Columbus Downtown in July 2010.
And from there I left Penn State and ended up joining an organization which was one of the first third-party compa- nies ever, called Leonard Hicks Inter- national Hotel Representatives. And my first job was in Washington, D.C., and I was a salesperson for Leonard Hicks, selling the association world and con- ventions to hotels around the world.
A
t the end of this month, Paul Astleford retires after more than 40 years in the meetings and hospitality industry — the last 13 of them as president and CEO
of Experience Columbus. He shares with Convene his journey from aerospace-engineering student to Dean Martin drinking buddy to transformative leader.
I was in aerospace engineering at Penn State, and this goes back to 1965. If you check your record books you will find that the aerospace industry, Lockheed Martin being one of them, was going bankrupt. And I had a counselor at Penn State who talked about me and aerospace engineering and the fact that I was going to have a tough time getting a job if I stuck to that. And I said, “So what do you recommend?” And she said, “Well, one of the things you could
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look at …,” and she mentioned a bunch [of possible fields].
One of them was leisure-time industries and how they were growing. I said, “What’s leisure-time industries?” She said, “Well, we have a hospitality school here at Penn State.” I was not going to be able to do much in the aerospace world, and so I signed up for hotel and institution management, or something like that. And so that started my career.
After Leonard Hicks, I ended up being the director of sales at the Hyatt in Monterey, Calif. Talk about memories. I remember Dean Martin was staying at the hotel, and we had a little golf course out back, and the general manager asked if I would take Dean over to the country club behind our hotel. This was in the morning. I drove Dean over. And we got to the clubhouse and Dean said, “Is the bar open?” And I said, “No, I don’t think so, but let me check.” So we had the guy come into the bar and ask Dean what he wanted. He said, “Give me some gin.” And the guy took what was like a water glass and put some gin in the bottom of it. And Dean said, “No, fill it up.” [Laughs.] He had a water glass full of gin that he drank right there on the spot before going out to play golf. Never forgot that.
Anyhow, I went from Monterey to San Jose, and was a director of sales at the San Jose Hyatt. Then from San Jose I opened the Hyatt Regency San Fran- cisco. That was May of 1973. And then in ’78 I went to the corporate office to work for Joe Kordsmeier, who was the vice president of sales at the time. That was in Chicago.
When I joined Hyatt in 1970, there were literally five motels. That was it. And by the time I left in 1987, Hyatt had 150 hotels. Those were incredible, incred- ible days growing up in the industry. I