Programme Kick-off
The Aman Academy
One place. Leaders come, learn, and go back accountable.
A dedicated facility in Phuket. Roughly 36 rooms, up to about 60 participants at a time. They live it, they do not commute to it.
A place is a privilege, not a default. Nominated, selected, and expected to deliver on return.
A calendar of five-day programmes by discipline, built around each property's peak periods.
Nobody carries it alone.
The Academy head runs the house. Welcomes the room, sets the tone, manages the facility, then hands the floor to the experts. A host, not a lecturer.
Subject-matter leaders from corporate and the best properties deliver the content. One person can never own every discipline, and is not asked to.
The thread that makes it stick. Participants leave able to teach it on. This is Dan's platform.
A frame everyone shares.
Host welcome, the cohort meets, the week is set.
LQA runs the assessed standards, condensed to the discipline.
Second LQA day. Behavioural and brand standards embedded.
The chosen format: technical, innovation, or exchange.
An AI thinking session, team-building, and what they take home.
Directional, not a blank page.
Treated like a guest, end to end.
One standardised kit, per discipline.
- A briefing pack each discipline head receives, identical in look and feel: what to teach, who should attend, what good looks like.
- Their inputs, our build. They give us the SOPs and the best-property content. We turn it into ready-to-run session plans.
- F&B goes first as the worked example, complete enough for every other function to model themselves on.
- Pre-work, prerequisites, and a measure of success built into every pack, so the value is clear before anyone travels.
About forty usable weeks. Then a question.
Map every property's peak periods, and the productive window is roughly forty weeks. The facility sits idle the rest of the year. What fills it, and what revenue does it earn, is a decision worth taking now.
A place they are proud to have won.
Twelve months served, a clean record, a leader or a genuine high-potential. A nomination the manager has to argue for.
A named cohort, a certificate, a LinkedIn moment. A signal to owners and future talent that Aman invests in its people.
High care and high expectation. They are hosted well, and held to account for what they carry home.
The briefing pack that goes out.
One standardised brief every discipline completes. Small, medium, or full — pre-agreed, not reinvented per property.
A fully populated five-day F&B programme, good enough for the other functions to copy the shape.
A short "what's in it for you" so the ask lands as an invitation, not a chore.
Out by end of August. Done by end of October.
We run it as light-touch checkpoints, not a heavy lift — short committee catch-ups that keep it off the last three days.
Three moves to start.
As soon as Dan is back, we build the worked example with the F&B team.
Sign off the shape, the roles, and the formats on offer.
DH project-manages the stage-gates so October lands calm.
Deep Hospitality