111 – TMG Hospitality Trailblazers: Patrick Pahlke

Suite Spot: A Hotel Marketing Podcast

Join Suite Spot podcast host and TMG Marketing Director Ryan Embree as he sits down and welcomes a very special guest, the EVP & Chief Commercial Officer of Sage Hospitality Group, Patrick Pahlke, in the latest episode of the TMG Hospitality Trailblazers series! This episode has something for everyone in the hospitality industry, so tune in now! Suite Spot Podcast · 111 - Hospitality Trailblazers: Patrick Pahlke 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 hotiers 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 so much for listening. Today we have another episode of our exciting series, TMG Hospitality Trailblazers. If you're just joining us for the first time, we are absolutely loving this series. We are bringing the brightest and best in our industry, those people and groups that are pushing our industry forward into 2023 and beyond. We've got a great guest with me today, before I introduce him. As always, you can always find our episodes anywhere you're finding our podcast, but also on YouTube. So check that out and let's go ahead and get rolling with the episode. So I will introduce our TMG Hospitality Trailblazer of the day. That is Patrick Pahlke, Chief Commercial Officer at Sage Hospitality. Patrick, welcome into the Suite Spot. Patrick Pahlke : Hello, I'm super delighted to be here. Thanks for having me. Ryan Embree: We're excited to have you, you're the guest of honor today, so let's go ahead and open it up with a question for all of our first timers on the Suite Spot. We know we work in an industry where people can come from anywhere and they have some, sometimes some strange journeys in order to get to where they are today. So tell us a little bit about your journey to Sage Hospitality Group. Was it more the traditional way of maybe starting at the front desk and working up or completely outta left field? Cause we've heard those stories on this series as well. Patrick Pahlke : Yeah, no, mine is a long one. I would say so. First of all, as you can hear from my pungent accent, I'm from Germany originally, and, I had, I had the opportunity of living in different countries as a child with my parents. And, at one point, when I was six years old, we stayed, we lived in a hotel for, for three months, and that hotel was my playground and the general manager of that hotel was like a god for me. It was in Jakarta and it was the Hilton International in 1981. Still remember very well. And I said to my parents, I want to be that guy one day, Mr. Schutz Sandorf was his name. And yeah, just kind of stuck to my childhood dream, you know, did an apprenticeship, entered the industry in Germany in the mid nineties. Worked in different places in Europe. At one point I studied, in Lozan in Switzerland, hotel management. Then, ventured out to Asia, stayed in Asia for 16 years, worked all over the place, mostly in the, in the five star field with Hyatt International. Worked with Mandarin Oriental as well. And then, in 2015, I ventured into the lifestyle space, you know, coming from the bigger brands, moving to a smaller company, commune hotels at that time, they don't exist anymore. They became two roads after a while and then two roads got acquired by Hyatt. Yeah. And, and once you make that move to the independent lifestyle space, you know, and, and you realize, you know, that entrepreneurial spirit that they, that they have, you know, from having a great idea to implementation when there's not much red tape in between. Once you get used to that, it's pretty addictive, you know. So since then I've never looked back,