117 – TMG Hospitality Trailblazers: Daniel Berman

Suite Spot: A Hotel Marketing Podcast

Our latest and greatest TMG Hospitality Trailblazers episode features the President and CEO of AD1 Global, Daniel Berman! Join Suite Spot host, Ryan Embree, as he and Daniel discuss some very eye-opening hospitality subjects prevailing in the industry and give insights into how hoteliers can effectively navigate the landscape. And so much more! Suite Spot Podcast · 117 - TMG Hospitality Trailblazers: Daniel Berman Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check in, and we check out what's trending in hotel marketing. I'm your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of The Suite Spot. This is your host, as always, Ryan Embree, thank you for joining me. It's been a minute. We are going to be continuing our TMG Hospitality Trailblazers series. I am so excited for the next guest that we have today in our trailblazers series. If this is the first time you're hearing this, we've been doing this series almost for a year now. We've had almost a dozen hospitality leaders and trailblazers in our industry, and this series is all about the people and the groups that are pushing our industry forward. So very excited with that set up to invite our next Hospitality Trailblazers, Daniel Berman, president and CEO of AD1 Global. Daniel, thank you so much, for joining the Suite Spot today. Daniel Berman: Thank you for having me here. Ryan Embree: Yeah, and this is your first time here. So what we do with all of our first time guests is we live in an industry or work in an industry rather, where we've got all types of stories of how people end up where they are. So, give us a little bit of background on your hospitality journey and what led you to AD1 Global. Daniel Berman: Yes, perfect. So thank you again for having me here. I was born in Caracas, Venezuela, move to United States in 2001. And while deciding what to do here and, I learned how to do invest in real estate. Started in 2008, and then I got into the hospitality by mistake. We bought, we bought, and my partners and me, Ari and Alex and me, we bought, almost 500 room hotel, thinking there was a real estate investment. Didn't understood there was a business within the real estate and we almost lost everything. It took us about two years, almost three years to get that project, on a positive numbers, decided that we love the business. It was very hard, but we learned the hard way and thank God, that's how AD1 was born. Ryan Embree: Wow. You didn't really start off small huh? When it was straight for the 500 Room hotel. That's pretty amazing. And you know what, I was talking to Daniel before this episode started because the VP of HR over there in AD1 Global Bertha Cordovis actually gave me my first job in hospitality, which was a bellman, at a resort here in Orlando. So, it's funny how, you know, we talk about these journeys and hospitality and you, I've heard the mistake one before. I've heard, you know, the journey of, of saying, Hey, I'm just going to school. This was a side gig. That might be a first for me of hearing, you know, purchasing a 500 room hotel and kind of falling into the industry. But we're so happy that we found this, you know, and we'll kind of talk about this love for our industry and transition. Ryan Embree: You know, before we start really talking about where we are today, where we've kind of gone with this series has kind of started with this rocky road that we've been on the past couple years, right. Obviously the pandemic in 2020. We've now had some time to kind of time to reflect on that recovery which is nice, but still, you know, battling some headwinds with staffing shortages here and there. Tell me a little bit about,