Melissa Schneider

Marketing Director @Lani Kai Island Resort

Fort Myers Beach, FL, US

Prior to Hurricane Ian’s catastrophic devastation of Fort Myers Beach (September 2022), I kept this award-winning resort in the public\'s eye, letting them know of all the wonderful offerings taking place, interacting with the many guests with utmost happiness and enthusiasm. I marketed our many in-house venues so well with so many unique strategies that we reached record numbers and profits across the board, even through some of the worst times for island hospitality, including the year of a horribly bad red tide, Covid19 pandemic, and Hurricane Ian). Handles all media/PR contact; creates all advertising (digital/print); continually grows our ever-expanding guest list for return marketing; maximizes social media to continually, successfully grow online audience; designs all in-house material; provides professional photography/videography; runs social media through several platforms daily (each venue at the hotel has its own following and demographic, so each has its own identity online; runs our merchandising, both online and local (inventory, online listings, personally gift-wraps/ships each order); maintain our venues’ websites and design; assisting anywhere I can, to ensure our business is successful with happy guests, patrons and customers. Since Hurricane Ian, the family-owned hotel group kept about 1/20th of their staff on payroll as we continued cleanup and the extensive rebuild; I was one of those very few. In that time, I’ve continued marketing to our many followers, keeping them engaged and grow our following for when we were able to reopen, to allow a much smoother transition. Also run the very successful marketing campaign with our “Lani Kai Strong” merchandising, which, for nearly a year after the storm, was our ONLY means of revenue coming into the business. Integral part of the interior redesign team, including two restaurants, lobby, front desk and guestrooms. Personally designed much of the custom furniture and worked directly with the vendors.

Edison State College

Associate of Arts and Sciences (AAS)