hotelBschool was founded by Holly Zoba and Dan Wacksman, hotel industry veterans. Together they identified a need in the industry that they hope to fill. In 2018 Holly founded her company, Scout Simply to address the specific needs of hotel salespeople. Her training programs, both digital and live, were extremely successful and have been adopted by independent hotels, branded hotels, and entire brands. As she worked with the various hotels and brands it was clear that there were many more areas where industry-specific training could be used. In 2019, Dan founded his company, Sassato, to help hotels optimize marketing, distribution, and technology. In working with numerous hotels and brands, Dan also saw that there was a deep lack of knowledge and training resources specific to hospitality in these and other areas. Their first foray into this was when they decided, in conjunction with the Hotel Sales and Marketing Association International (HSMAI), to develop the Hotel Digital Marketing Essentials Course (HDME). The HDME class has been taken by hundreds of industry professionals and has been private labeled for some of the largest hotel brands and management in companies. The HDME has become the industry-leading course for digital marketing. Soon Holly and Dan started getting requests to create other courses from hotels and brands, and at the same time getting requests from experts to help them create courses of their own. This, along with the success of the Hotel Digital Marketing Essentials course and Holly’s sales training validated their thesis that there was indeed a need in the market for a high-quality industry specific training platform.