Planning a family vacation can come with some difficulties. Finding perfectly priced plane tickets and booking a perfectly priced hotel room can be a pain. However, Mr. Gianni Marostica has the answer to solve these frustrating problems.
On Wednesday, October 16, the Jesuit Entrepreneurship club was able to meet and speak to Mr. Gianni Marostica, Commercial Director at Google Travel, via Google+ video call. Marostica originally resided in Dallas and was a close neighbor and family friend to James Schroeder ’15, who is the student head of the Entrepreneurship Club.
“He used to live across the street from me,” explained Schroeder. “We’d go to dinners every Sunday and we’d go on vacation [together].”
He then moved to Boston to carry out his profession at Google Travel. He, along with the rest of his wing, creates products that help customers with their travel experience through aspects such as ticket finding, hotel booking, and car rentals.
Google Travel is a program designed to provide the most personalized and best experience when planning a trip. Google Travel allows you to find tickets from one destination to the next and find a variety of ticket options ranging from cheapest to most expensive in order to suit your every need. The program also allows you to look for hotel options for a certain destination. You can even categorize hotel and ticket options via a bar graph to visually examine and choose the most reasonable options to satisfy your needs.
He went one by one down a list of slides on his tip-filled powerpoint to discuss how to make an ideal business approach through a list of steps:
1. Have a mission that matters.
“Whether you have a small club or a very large company, make it have an amazing statement,” stated Marostica. “This is what makes things clear [to the world] what your company is trying to do.”
2. Focus on the user. The rest will follow.
“Focusing on your customer, whether it is a user or it is a company, keep focusing on them. Understand what their needs are. If you are delivering a product or a service that matters to them, everything else will follow.”
3. Be open: share as much as you can.
“It (sharing) just creates an environment of one huge happy family where everyone is working together through the good times and through the tough times, but all working together to achieve goals. Openness, Sharing, and Communication are key.”
4. Moonshot ideas.
“Our co-founder has this interesting concept called “moonshot” ideas,” explained Marostica. “He’s always challenging us to think of some [really] big huge ideas that can really change the world, that can really change improve life for everybody.”
5. Use technology for good.
Marostica relates using technology for good to how the Japanese responded to the tsunamis recently. Japanese employees came up with a form of technology in which they came up with in almost a day to keep track of nearly all of the Japanese people by registering their information in this tool. While the power went out during the tsunamis, some of these Japanese employees were able to turn on some power generators to locate people hidden in places such as under rubble or in vehicles. “Loved ones who were traveling and were away from their families could essentially feel comfortable that somebody found their daughter, their son, their grandfather, their grandmother and basically feel satisfied that their friends and families were doing well,” continued Marostica. “That’s an example of how you use technology to do good for the general public.”
Schroeder, commenting on Mr. Marostica and his mission, says that his position at Google “creates a sense of community. I really respect what he does from a business standpoint and from an ethical standpoint too.”
So, next time you are planning a Hawaiian getaway or trying to start your own business, follow Mr. Gianni Marostica’s advice and you will be guaranteed to succeed.
