If there was a contest in the hospitality industry to determine the nicest person, John Rubino would have to be a frontrunner. But that’s not the only quality he brings to GF Hotels & Resorts as COO of the managed hotel division.
“One of the things that I bring is a love for hospitality, and I think I bring the intersection of what hospitality truly means in creating travel experiences and servicing guests merged with a sense of business to drive profit and return on investment for ownership groups,” he said. “Sometimes that’s missing; you don’t always get a leader in the hospitality industry that truly has that hospitality spirit in the business sense. We have to be able to know how to take care of our guests, but also have that business savvy to be able to drive a profit. Both are so necessary.”
Family Connections
Rubino grew up in Scranton, Pa., with two brothers and two sisters.
“We grew up in a loving family with two great parents that all loved each other and were raised in a great environment,” he said. “We also grew up around other family members, aunts and uncles that were next door and a few houses away in the same neighborhood within a block. It was a really fun upbringing to be able to go in and out of their houses and have family right there near you.”
When it was time for college, Rubino stayed close to home, attending a branch of Penn State University.
“Like most kids, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do or what I wanted to go to college for when I was in high school,” he said. “I started off in accounting, went through the first few semesters, and I was like, ‘I’m not sure if accounting is for me.’ Or maybe it was more like accounting said, ‘You’re not for us.’”
Rubino took a hard look at what he wanted to do instead, coming across hotel management in the school’s course offerings.
“I thought, ‘That’s crossed my mind in the past; that might be something I’d be interested in doing,’” he said.
At the time, Penn State had one of the top hospitality schools in the country, so Rubino decided he was in the right place to move forward in this new direction. This is where his strong family background came into play:
“I went home from school and I told my parents what I was thinking. And my mother said to me, “You know, your cousin teaches that at Penn State. You should talk to him.’ So I reached out to him, I went to visit him and got a tour of the school. We talked, then I changed my major to hotel and restaurant management and I graduated from Penn State with a bachelor’s degree in that.”
Rubino and his cousin started what seems to be a family tradition—by his count, he is one of eight family members that has either pursued a career in hotel management or has a degree in hotel management, including Rubino’s 28-year-old son.
Here’s the really interesting angle to the family hospitality story:
“My siblings and I were going through our parents’ things and I found a newspaper article about my great-grandfather, my mother’s mother’s father,” Rubino said. “He actually was a bellman at a hotel in Scranton, and that hotel has since closed. Maybe it was in our blood. I didn’t know my great-great-grandfather worked at a hotel and here I am doing what I’m doing.”
Professional Life
It’s been 35 years since Rubino left Penn State with his bachelor’s degree in hotel, restaurant and institutional management, and two years since he joined GF Hotels & Resorts. In between he spent 23 years at Interstate Hotels & Resorts, starting as the general manager of a Hampton Inn and rising to executive VP of Interstate’s Crossroads Hospitality division, with a short stint as SVP of operations at Island Hospitality Management.
Rubino said he’s happy he started in on-property roles because they prepared him to be a better corporate leader.
“I think you have to have that on-property experience to be able to function in the corporate world because of what we do at a corporate office,” he said. “We support our team members that are out in the field and if you haven’t done their jobs or you don’t know what their day-to-day work entails, it’s harder to lead them and to measure them and encourage them and help them do their jobs better.”
Rubino said he still remembers the struggles he had, what was hard and what was easy.
“A lot has changed now and the struggles have changed, but if you stay close to your people and you communicate with them and you put yourself in their shoes and you try to understand what challenges they have, you can be a better leader and you can help them overcome their challenges and help them get to the next level in their career,” he said. “Nothing gives me greater satisfaction than to see team members under me be able to move on to bigger roles or to their dream jobs.”
GF Hotels & Resorts
Headquarters: Philadelphia
Structure: Ownership and management
Portfolio: 21,825 guestrooms, 144 properties
Website: www.gfhotels.com