I’m a hospo girl from way back. When I graduated from high school, I had stated in our yearbook that my grand plan was to own hotels in Sydney, and so I marched myself off to Hospitality College to learn the trade and start my career – an industry I worked in for just under a decade.
Fast forward 30 years from graduating high school, and while I don’t own any hotels, I do own a business that works with an industry that’s very close to my heart.
Back in 2021 we began a partnership with the Australian Hotels Association (Vic) to support the Association assess their State Awards for Excellence in 2022. I knew it was going to be a big undertaking for our growing business while recovering from the pandemic but I was pumped to support an industry that had really been hit hard by COVID, particularly hotels in Victoria.
Myself and my team have loved every minute of this partnership over the last four years – because that’s exactly what it’s been; a partnership. Every year we work on improving the criteria based on best practice industry standards, and we both work on ways to improve our processes so the AHA (Vic) members get assessed by the best people, benchmarked against their peers in their nominated categories and receive a quality report that reflects a guest’s experience.
After a successful awards program with AHA (Vic) in early 2022, we expanded our partnership to also assess the Victorian Accommodation Awards for Excellence with the Accommodation Association that same year, who we’ve continued to work with ever since.
Everyone’s personal favourite has to be the “Best Parma” award category (known as “Parmi” in other states!) But we also assess categories like Best Restaurant, Best Bar, Best Meeting and Events space, Best Retail Space and Best Accommodation.
While not every hotel can be a winner or become a finalist, we love that our reports are given to all the hotels who nominate. Our aim is to provide the hotels with feedback that they can take back to their teams for coaching purposes and process improvement.
Kimberley Malcolm, General Manager – Member Experience & Compliance recently agreed to us taking a dive into the impact our partnership has had on their annual Awards, Association and their members. The end result is this amazing case study that is both a testament to the exceptional commitment from AHA (Vic) to their members and to my team here at Human Experience.
CHECK OUT THE AHA (VIC) CASE STUDY HERE
In a world where consumers are mindful about where they spend their money, industry awards like these send a strong message about what hotels are working hard to deliver an exceptional experience to their guests and a superior product.
At Human Experience we’re super proud of our partnership with the Australian Hotels Association. Over the last four years, we’ve built a robust assessment process against best practice industry standards and we are confident that the finalists and winners of these awards fully deserve the recognition they receive.
Nic McClanachan
July, 2025
