Meet Maria Stoyanova, young tourism professional from Bulgarian, Content Manager at Travel Massive and Community Manager at WHTT.
What are your superpoweres?
Since I was young, I’ve been very organized and I love following a structure in everything I do. This is why when I started organizing events for different types of communities, I really found my true passion.
I am also very detail-oriented and I try to pay attention to every small piece of the bigger picture – that always gives me sense of relief and accomplishment. If everything is taken care of or thought of in advance, then there are less things to worry about and you can actually enjoy the fruits of your work.
How do your strengths play into the work you do?
Organizing offline and online events, managing content, partnership relations and campaigns, requires a lot of focus and structure. Especially when working completely remotely and your team is kilometers away, you have to learn to work independently. Which is why being self-organized and disciplined plays a key role in my position.
My strengths also helped me in my academic path – I graduated with excellent results in my Masters and PhD Degrees in Tourism Management.
Imagine your best hospitality / hotel experience – what does it look like?
I’m a big advocate of forming communities and I believe the best hospitality experience would be in a place where they understand that. The brand should manifest a value that will attract people who share the same vision - and that way, naturally, a community can be created and maintained. That way, it’s much easier for people to feel that they belong. In that sense, I’m a big fan of citizenM and Zoku which are two hospitality brands that are doing it right!
What brings you the greatest joy at work?
Facilitating the exchange of ideas and connections and seeing that people get even more motivated by that is a true pleasure. Also, being able to build an actual community where people help each other and contribute to each other’s success is something that still keeps me going.
My advice for women in hospitality and travel-tech:
Be creative and don’t be scared to try out or propose new ideas at the workplace – the right people will sooner or later notice and support you. I’ve heard so many times “Oh, I have this idea but…” and people are stopping themselves from what they are really passionate about. Switch the “but” with “and” – that’s when the magic happens. Even if some of your ideas don’t work, you’ll learn far more lessons from that than any other mundane task.
Connect with Maria Stoyanova and other members on our WHTT Community Group on LinkedIn!
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