Jaap Funnekotter

About Jaap Funnekotter

With this title Jaap Funnekotter brings you a stirring and interactive story about how companies outside the hospitality industry can make good use of the service concepts from international top hotels. Jaap puts his listeners in the position of a hotel or restaurant guest, instead of addressing them as a subject matter expert within their own field. After all everyone is, in his role as a guest, an authority in the field of hospitality experiences and knows immediately what is right and what is wrong regarding the service he has received and the behavior displayed by the service staff.

From that situation on he leads his audience, in an interactive presentation, past topics such as the changing consumer, customer experience, customer loyalty and customer retention. He demonstrates that not the core activities of an enterprise determine its continuity and success, but that these are mainly realized through the hospitable, customer oriented behavior of its employees.

Funnekotter interlaces his presentation with clear and sometimes humorous examples from practice and success stories from the world of hospitality, but also from other economic sectors.

At the end of the presentation, the listener will understand that if you want to excel as an enterprise or institution “directed hospitable behaviour” of management and employees should be part of your companies’ strategy. Also, the listener has gotten an understanding on how to implement this strategy with the help of proven concepts and systems from the international hospitality industry.

Jaap P.F.M. Funnekotter is a graduate of Hotelschool The Hague. Funnekotter has been working in the hospitality industry for a great number of years. He started his career in the U.S.A. with the Hilton Corporation and he gained further managerial experience in several hotels in Europe and the Netherlands, domestic ones as well as international chain hotels. He also managed for a period of 10 years the hotel activities of a company in the field of health care.

In 1991 he returned to his “Alma Mater” to work for their Training & Consultancy Division. Up till his retirement on 31 March 2011 he was General Manager of Hotelschool The Hague Performance Management BV (HPM), a company specialized in consulting and learning & development projects for the international hospitality industry and also non-hotel companies, as well as projects for assisting client organizations in setting up hotel schools and –training centers on vocational and and management level. Among the clients one can find Hilton, Starwood, InterContinental, Shangri-La Hotels & Resorts, Mercedes Benz, PON Automotive, AMC Hospital. HPM also founded and runs the Golf Management Academy. For hotel school projects clients were among others World Tourism Organization, European Commission, FMO Bank.

Next to his home country Jaap carried out project and assignments in over 40 countries on all continents of the globe.

As of 1 April 2011 Jaap has started his own company, FUNDAM Hospitality & Tourism Services, providing training and consultancy services for (international) clients in the hospitality education sector, hospitality & tourism enterprises, as well as other companies interested in making hospitable behavior of their staff the competitive edge of their activities.

Furthermore he is active as a speaker on this subject (and on others) and as a conference chairman. His presentations, although the content is treated seriously, are always interlaced with some humor and are highly interactive, even with large audiences.

Funnekotter is a member of the Board of Directors of The Leading Hotel Schools of the World (LHSW), an association of independent top hotel schools in Europe, Asia and the Americas, co-founded by Hotelschool The Hague.

Moreover he serves on the Board of Directors of a Dutch charity foundation as non-executive Chairman.

In April 2010 Funnekotter received by order of H.M. Queen Beatrix of The Netherlands a Knighthood in the Order of Orange Nassau for his L&D activities worldwide in the past 2½ decades in the hospitality sector.