For more than two decades, John Sergi's hospitality designs have proven successful in building brands, fostering fan loyalty, creating surprise and delight for guests, and generating increased sales at some of the world's best-known venues and events.

As possibly the world's only hospitality strategist, John has played a critical role in developing the guest experience at the New York Mets' Citifield, the USTA's US Open, and London's Wembley Stadium. He has also played an instrumental role in the creation of hospitality programs for the NFL, the NBA, and numerous tournaments on professional golf and tennis tours. Abroad, he has worked with facilities and organizations including Scotland's Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews, the Galatasaray Sporting Club in Istanbul, and the Estadio do Maracanã in Rio de Janeiro, as well as numerous resorts, events, festivals and concerts.

John has had a lifelong relationship with food and hospitality. From his first job at age eleven working at a friend's Italian deli to earning his master's degree from the Cornell University Hotel School (where he honed his strategic hospitality principles), John has spent 45 years lifting the role of food and hospitality at big venues. His philosophy is compelling: food is quite possibly the most powerful common language on earth—too powerful to be considered only as a direct revenue source. Food (especially in its broader context of hospitality) speaks to the guest in a way few things can, which makes it intensely memorable. It has the capacity to embody brand essence, and engage guests at a primal level.

John's philosophy of hospitality can be distilled into four key words: vision, responsibility, context and perspective.

VISION: What's the soul of the brand?

It all starts with brand clarity. Who are you and how are you different? Once we understand your brand, then we can translate into the language of food. It then extends to a vision for the facility (what will it be like?) and for the experience (what will it feel like?).

RESPONSIBILITY: To your customers, it's your food.

It's your event, your location, your guests, your building, your fans, and therefore it's your food. Hiring a company to provide and manage the food does not absolve you of this responsibility.

CONTEXT: Food can do more than sell food -it can support core revenue streams.

You can make more from food than you can make off food. What you make off food is simply food direct revenue—what you can make from food is the food direct revenue plus supporting brand identity to drive core revenues streams like tickets, premium seating products, and sponsorships. Food is in context when it contributes to the overall business.

PERSPECTIVE: Hospitality is a critical component of the enterprise.

Food and hospitality must be viewed and managed with the same perspective applied to other key elements of the business. This requires that the highest levels of the venue team have their "hands on the wheel."

 

Previous Sergi Projects

Prior to joining Centerplate, Sergi was instrumental in creating hospitality programs for the following clients and venues. He is enthusiastic about his work, and we've kept the comments below in John's own words to convey a sense of that energy.

 

Tropicana Field for the Tampa Bay Rays

Background
Wine and baseball? Really.

This project is a great illustration of a core Centerplate Stir™ belief that focused strategic design thinking can challenge conventional wisdom and pay big dividends in incremental sales. In this case, the unlikely topic is wine at a Major League ballpark, almost always treated as an afterthought of the supplier relationship, not as a chance to connect with guests. The accepted thought is that wine sales will always be marginal at best.

Key Brand Insights
Two important issues aligned at Tropicana Field. First and foremost, the Rays executive team has repeatedly shown a demonstrated capacity to view hospitality as a strategic component of their business. They also have an appealing willingness to approach conventional issues with unconventional ideas. The Rays brand identity reflects this leadership attitude and their fan base shares this adventurous spirit. Anyone who has ever gone to a Rays game at Tropicana Field can testify to this unique brand experience. Like its home city and fans, this is a ballpark that offers an intoxicating mix of latin, Caribbean, and Gulf coast influences, with a healthy dose of Florida sunshine state attitude.

In demographic research for Tropicana Field, the Centerplate Stir™ team noticed an interesting data point that Tampa Bay ranks fifth nationwide in urban area wine sales, significantly higher than its population numbers would predict. Wine sales at Tropicana Field, however, did not reflect this. We saw this as an opportunity to re-invent wine sales for the "Trop," and to build a fan-first wine program that would outperform conventional supplier-first programs in every dimension.

The Centerplate Stir™ Solution
We set out to connect with this latent demand that we felt we had identified. Quite simply, we wanted to help our guests feel welcome to drink wine at Tropicana Field, rather than feeling like outsiders. To us this really illustrates the core of the concept of hospitality—to help guests feel welcome.

So the challenge was to make wine visible and accessible, to reach out and engage, to make it fun, and to make it trustworthy and understandable. For support, we tapped the expertise of Andrew McMurray and Jeremy Noye at Zachy's, one of the country's leading wine retailers.

The first necessary element was content—every wine in the building needed to be an honest value. After careful research we chose a portfolio of wines from Sherbrooke Cellars and Appellation Wine Company that represented great depth and diversity, including wines from California, Washington, Oregon, Italy, and New Zealand. And the quality level of every wine belied its reasonable pricing.

We explored a number of ways to activate the program. For retail concessions, we built two specialty wine carts to be symmetrically placed in the first and third base food courts. Each cart offers six wines by the glass ranging from $8 to $11.

To make it fun and engaging, we staff the carts with sommeliers who add a personal touch to every transaction. It's a completely unexpected wine experience in a concession environment in a ballpark. For additional fun and accessibility we shot some video at the carts with Andrew McMurray suggesting hot dog/wine pairings for projection on the in-stadium video board.

For the suites wine list we focused on context, understandability, and the removal of all pretense. For context, more than 80% of the list is comprised of wines for less than $50 a bottle, providing lots of choices well within the ideal range of pricing for most suite customers. To aid understandability, we removed complicated categories and esoteric descriptors. The wines are shown in just three categories: "Workers" which are everyday wines, "Sleepers" which are hidden values, and "High Steppers." All descriptors are limited to one or two simple sentences, in language everyone can appreciate.

Finally, to build top-of-mind awareness and interest, we designed a series of Winemaker Events where the winemakers from our key wineries would stage tastings at Tropicana Field for general ticketholders, suites and premium customers.

Results
To date, wine sales at Rays games have more than doubled. Guest reactions have been extremely positive, with many appreciative comments expressing surprise and delight.

 

New Meadowlands Stadium

When I first sat down with the Jets and the Giants to discuss the New Meadowlands, I asked them what is different about their program from all of the others across the country. "At our games, even the suite holders paint their faces! These people are the most serious fans in football," they told me. With that in mind, I wanted to keep the food program true to who the team and the fans are - real food for real football fans. Teaming up with Chefs Eric Borgia and Chris Harkness of the food service provider, we created a menu unique to the fans in this part of the country - Peppers and Eggs Sandwiches, Taylor Ham, Meatballs, Chili, Roast Pork, Fried Clams, Fried hotdogs. We took an honest run at trying to interpret what this corner of the world feels is real football food. The program today, Home Food Advantage, is as authentic as food in football gets.

New York Mets' Citi Field

From the first day I was introduced to this project it was clear that something very special was in the works. The vision for the project went well beyond a clear idea of what the stadium would be like upon completion, and was focused to the point of knowing what the stadium should feel like to the fans. This focus did not waver through the entire design and development process—in fact the focus actually sharpened. Though the uniquely New York food experiences we created are innovative, what is truly innovative is the client relationship that enabled this all to actually happen.

Royal Isabela

This was a very distinctive project—1,800 acres including three and a half miles of coastline on the northwest shore of Puerto Rico. It's a mix of 36 holes of golf, resort amenities, private estates and an exclusive 20-room inn. The food ranges from a full service restaurant, to golf grill room and turn house, to room service for the inn, to extensive catering capacity both on-property and to service the needs of the private estates. The golf course is dramatic, and the intent of the owners (who were focused on "green" principles long before it was in fashion) was to make it feel like the course "came out of the ground." The intent was to move as little dirt as possible to build the course. When it came to the hospitality, it was obvious that to support the "out of the ground" message, we'd make the food sustainable with much of it grown or raised on the resort property, and sourced from organic farmers. It has been a great success and illustrates the potential of translating a project's mission statement directly into food and hospitality terms.

Los Angeles Dodgers' Dodger Stadium

The Dodgers are one of the most storied franchises in professional sports, and their home, Dodger Stadium, is the third oldest in baseball, recently celebrating its 50th year. The forward-thinking ownership group and management has advanced a "Dodger Stadium-The Next Fifty Years" project. I am proud to be a member of the project team charged with maintaining the traditions of this iconic stadium, while at the same time creating new and innovative fan experiences intended to be well ahead of the curve of current hospitality design trends. With the spike in new stadium/arena development of the past decade, the science of renovation and re-invention will be the next trend, and the Dodgers are solidly positioned to lead the charge.

USTA's U.S. Open

I was brought onto the U.S. Open to help with the transition to the new USTA National Tennis Center and Arthur Ashe Stadium in 1997. Over the next 13 years, I worked closely with the managing director of the facility to see a greater than two-fold increase in food and beverage activity, supported by an ongoing commitment to create new and varied guest experiences. I have often invited friends from the restaurant industry to the event, some of the top people in the business, and they all have a similar response—they have never seen anything like this anywhere. The scale, diversity, complexity and quality of this foodservice program is unparalleled in sports.

Pilot Pen Championships, New Haven, Connecticut

I helped relocate the then Volvo International from Stratton Mountain, Vermont to Yale University in Connecticut in 1989. This was one of the first big venue events in the US to "get" the deliberate use of food as an emotional communicator in support of a brand message. The strategy was to use food as a tool to gain support for the event from the local community, the hosts of the tournament. We decided to use only local artisan suppliers. These relationships are still in place to this day and the event generates double the average food and beverage volume compared to other events of its size.

Quail Hollow Championship, formerly the Wachovia Championship

This project remains a great reminder of the importance of clarity of vision. Within minutes of my first meeting with the tournament founders, it was clear that this event was going to change the paradigm of a PGA tour event. The goal was to raise the bar in every category. Our challenge was to use food to support this "quality first" brand identity. We did research into the general fan's view of food. We found that there were basically two types of fans that attend these events: the avid fan who wants food quickly; and the casual fan who enjoys a variety of food options and tends to stay closer to the clubhouse. We designed the food operations to accommodate both types, with speed and convenience around the course for the avid fans, and experiential foods (freshly made salads, crepes, Panini) closer to the clubhouse.

The Rose Bowl

The Rose Bowl project is special on a number of levels. I was invited to be on the design team by friend and colleague, Janet Marie Smith. The challenge put forth by the Rose Bowl Operating Committee was to develop a conceptual foodservice plan for the future that respects this historic venue while fully embracing the unique Pasadena setting. Then consider that the Rose Bowl hosts UCLA home games, world-class concerts, soccer, a very California-cool flea market, the BCS Championship, and of course the "Grandaddy of them All," the Rose Bowl. It was a complex challenge to create a hospitality program appropriate to the stature of this one-of-a-kind venue, and truly an honor to be involved.

BNP Paribas Open, Indian Wells, California

The BNP Paribas Open is an event with a long history in the California desert. I was originally brought into the project twelve years ago, initially to design the food facilities and programs for a new 14,000-seat stadium—the Indian Wells Tennis Garden. This was a great project in that I was involved on the foundational level and was able to design and implement the food service facilities as well as the hospitality program. Each year on the Monday before the tournament starts, I have a tradition of cooking dinner in the kitchen I designed for all of the chefs on staff. It's a great opportunity to connect with the folks who are going to spend the next two weeks feeding everyone else. The 2009 tournament marked my 10th year in this stadium.

Travelers Championship, Cromwell, Connecticut

In many ways, events or properties that are smaller in scale like Travelers are actually more challenging for strategic hospitality solutions. Though the scale is smaller and more manageable, so is the level of customer activity, which gives you less critical mass to support programs and services. Creativity is at a premium, requiring completely customized solutions. This makes the results that much more gratifying. This was a multi-year improvement program that was dedicated to giving the hospitality an authentic Hartford feel, consistent with the event's new positioning as Hartford's home-grown, pro sports event.

 

Sports
The Open Championship, UK (The R&A)
The USGA's U.S. Open
International Stadia Group (ISG)
Wembley Stadium, UK
Donington Park, UK
1996 Summer Olympics, Atlanta, GA
Time Warner Cable Arena, Charlotte, NC
Bank of America Stadium, Charlotte, NC
The Buick Classic Golf
The Federation Cup
Volvo Tennis San Francisco, SF, CA
AT&T Championships, Atlanta, GA
The Sovereign Bank Classic, Washington, DC
Sony Ericsson Open, Miami, FL
The Purex Championships, Scottsdale, AZ
Hamlet Tennis Cup, Commack, NY
CART Cleveland, Cleveland, OH
Galatasaray Sporting Club, Istanbul, Turkey
Estadio do Maracanã, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Resorts and Festivals
Jazzscapes, Bermuda
Riverfest Arkansas, Little Rock, Arkansas
Indian Wells Concert Series, Indian Wells, CA

Other
Customshop Restaurant, Charlotte, North Carolina
Providence Day School, Charlotte, North Carolina