Last August, Maribeth Bisienere marked 30 years of leadership roles at The Walt Disney Company and Walt Disney World Resort, where she currently serves as senior vice president – resorts, transportation, premium services, food & beverage, and merchandise. Bisienere oversees 33 unique Walt Disney World Resort hotels that provide leisure guests and convention groups easy access to a vast portfolio of recreational venues, including four world-renowned theme parks. Fortunately, it is not rare for a woman to occupy a senior executive position like Bisienere’s in hospitality today, signifying the progress women have made in the field over the decades. “There are many more women that are at the level I’m at now than what I saw when starting my own career,” she observed. “We have women that are in every type of leadership role you can possibly imagine. I feel like we’re represented across the board in all areas of our industry now. So, we’ve come a long way.”
Yet the potential for further progress remains, and Bisienere has leveraged her prominent position in the industry to help develop other women leaders as well as promising talent in general. “I have always sought out individuals to showcase their talent and helped them see a pipeline of places where they can grow and develop. It’s probably the greatest calling I have as a leader,” she said. That priority stems from her upbringing. “My mother always said to make sure you assist others in helping to achieve their goals,” related Bisienere, who is one of five daughters. “So, I’ve been very focused on how we can lift other women up, and how do we help to provide a network for women to see the different areas where they can grow and develop.”
Toward that end, she has worked with organizations within Disney as well as hospitality industry associations. “I have worked very closely with Disney over the years to develop our women through our Women’s Inclusion Network, one of our affinity groups,” she said. “We wanted to have a place where women could help to mentor and foster relationships with each other.” The Women’s Inclusion Network, launched about eight years ago, has succeeded in guiding more women into leadership roles at the company, but it’s not only women who can make a positive impact through mentorship, Bisienere pointed out. “Some of the greatest leaders I’ve ever worked with have been men who have said, ‘Maribeth, let me show you a path for something I see in you.’ So, it’s not just women helping women; it’s also men helping women.”
Bisienere has also championed diversity and inclusion as a member of the Central Florida Hotel Association and board of trustees at Johnson & Wales University, where she holds an honorary doctorate degree in business administration and management. She joined the AHLA Board following the COVID-19 pandemic and has supported the association’s diversity initiatives, such as FORWARD, launched by the AHLA Foundation in 2018, and the overarching goal of promoting hospitality as a great career choice. “We’ve been very thoughtful about how to ensure we bring people to our industry that are very interested in finding and flourishing in a career,” she said. “That’s been very important to do, and I think we’ve done that very successfully as a board and continue to focus on the foundation—bringing new people into the industry as owners or leaders.”
Early Career Moves
Bisienere’s own attraction to hospitality has familial roots: her father was in the restaurant business, and she and her sisters worked in that business growing up. She also recalled being a fan of the ‘80s TV series Hotel. However, she went to college to study political science—a field she soon discovered was not for her. “One of my friends convinced me to take what they now call a gap year and go skiing in Colorado and become a housekeeper at a hotel. I did it all, including front office and accounting,” she related. “But I had no idea that gap year would lead me to realize that I love this business.”
Bisienere went on to earn a GMP certification in hospitality administration/management from Cornell University and acquire managerial experience at The Colonnade Hotel, a boutique property in Boston, and the Radisson Hotel Johnson & Wales University in Rhode Island. Her career path then took a turn to the Southeast when she was hired as GM of Disney’s Caribbean Beach Resort in August 1995. Running a 2,200-room hotel at more than 90 percent occupancy was “a big change, but I loved it,” she said. “The guests that stayed at my property were there because of their love of Disney. They had been coming for generations and would tell me the story about why they love Disney. It was just a whole different aspect of hospitality.”
The Value of Minority Representation
The move from small hotels to a property that was part of an iconic brand and major employer in Florida opened a world of career potential for Bisienere, who went on to serve as GM of the Disney Institute and GM of Disney’s Contemporary Resort in the late ‘90s. She then transitioned to VP roles in alliance development, business development, and F&B and merchandise at The Walt Disney Company, before rising to SVP roles at Walt Disney World, overseeing resort operations.
As Central Florida’s largest employer, Walt Disney World offers a wide array of career opportunities in hospitality and currently employs approximately 80,000 “cast members”—an all-time high. One in every 32 Florida jobs can be attributed to Disney, a company that emphasizes staff engagement, retention, and diversity. “I think that in the industry in general, we’re pretty open to all types of people belonging,” Bisienere observed. “I would also say that our guests want to ‘see themselves’ in the cast that are working at the resort. Our guests and our cast have to be reflective of each other. So, we want to be able to make sure we’re representing those guests that we’re trying to attract, and that means being deliberate about making sure we have a diverse audience of cast members.”
Enhancing the ethnic diversity among staff not only improves the guest experience, but also ensures operational decisions are informed by diverse perspectives. “It’s a cultural diversity and a thought diversity,” she said. “I have a very strong belief when I’m hiring people for my own team that I don’t want people that are all like me. I’m a much better when I have people [working with me] that are very different than me—different backgrounds, different thoughts, different schooling, etc.”
Development and Retention
Like all operations executives in hospitality, Bisienere is focused on retaining great team members, and talent development is integral to that effort. “Retention is critical. Anybody in our business is competing to get the best employees, and the more that we give them to develop themselves, the more they want to be here and stay,” she explained. “I’ve never met a person that doesn’t want to be developed in their career.” For her own part, Bisienere is “thoughtful about what cast members have in their own skill portfolio, and if they’re missing something or there’s a gap, I will move them to a place that perhaps they have not had exposure to,” she said. “For example, I’ll move them from development roles to finance roles or to commercial and business roles, and vice versa. They become a more balanced leader if they’ve had a plethora of operations experience.”
Disney itself offers apprenticeships, certificate courses, and other development programs that enable cast members to expand their skillsets and take the next step in their careers. More than 8,000 Walt Disney World cast members are actively enrolled in Disney Aspire, the company’s education investment and career development program offering tuition paid up front for full- and part-time hourly employees. In addition, the Walt Disney World Leadership Conference and monthly leadership courses support staff members who want to ascend to supervisory roles. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs also foster retention, and Walt Disney World supports several voluntary, employee-led DEI resource groups to build community around shared identity, interests, and pursuits. Initiatives such as these have furthered both career advancement and employee retention, as revealed by key HR statistics: In the past five years, more than 3,700 Walt Disney World staff members were promoted from hourly to salaried roles. And on average, full-time professional and skilled-labor team members have worked at Walt Disney World for 12 years.
An engaging, on-the-job experience also supports longevity, as team members look forward to each workday. “The cast at Disney have such an incredible loyalty to the Disney brand, and for them, the greatest incentive is if we can light them up to create a magical experience for our guests. So, they’re very focused on being able to do that,” Bisienere added. “For example, we just opened the Polynesian Tower at our iconic Polynesian Resort, where the cast can be a part of creating a genuine Polynesian experience for our guests.”
Welcoming Challenges
Reflecting on the progress she has made in her long career with Disney, Bisienere cites the value of the challenges she has undertaken. “I consider myself very lucky that I’ve [faced] a wide array of different challenges, including national and international business development operations,” she said, highlighting her six years as SVP of Disney Springs in particular. “I had the pleasure of shepherding that opening, and that was really something—to be able to bring it from a handful of restaurants and shops to over 150,” she said. “We have six James Beard Award-winning chef restaurants, and it’s just a magnificent retail dining and entertainment experience.”
Perhaps her most significant challenge—and achievement—is being an integral part of the resort’s pandemic recovery. “If I go back and think about something that I’m the proudest of, it’s how we reopened after COVID, because I have 33 resorts here—30,000 hotel rooms—and we had to come together and open every individual resort like it was the first time,” she explained. “We had an incredibly dedicated cast, a very unique culture, and we just pulled together for a common reason. Everybody wanted the same end result, and the guests that were staying here were so happy to be able to come and see their Disney open up again. It was a lot of hard work and incredibly gratifying, so that’s a major highlight.”
In view of how rewarding it was to overcome these challenges, Bisienere shared her main advice for women who seek to advance their hospitality careers. “Say yes to every unique opportunity that can come your way,” she stressed. “I’m a big believer in being uncomfortable if something slightly supports you, and I’m usually very interested in it. That means it’s a new skill. It’s something to learn. So be that person that says, ‘I’ll do something that’s hard. I want to learn and take on new things as much as possible.’ And be confident in yourself. A lot of people question, ‘Could I do that?’ The answer is yes. Be confident that you could do it and be willing to get out there and take the risk to learn and develop yourself.”
