Hospitality isn’t a department. It’s a feeling, and you deserve to feel it.
My name is Roketa, and I’ve spent most of my life on both sides of the welcome mat.
I grew up folding napkins and setting silverware in a fine dining room inside a retirement home, tucked away in the woods of midcoast Maine. White tablecloths, formal plating, the whole thing. In 2013, I crossed into hotels, starting at the front desk of a boutique property that eventually became a hybrid Sheraton/Le Méridien. I’ve worked as a room attendant, a self-inspector, a breakfast attendant, and eventually a Director of Operations. I know what it takes to make a guest feel genuinely welcome. I also know exactly what it looks like when no one tries.
Whether you’re paying full rate or traveling on an employee discount, you should feel like you belong in the room you paid for. That’s not a luxury. That’s the whole point.
Too many people – guests and especially employees – move through hospitality spaces without ever actually feeling welcomed in them. Bad service recovery. Undertrained staff. The quiet indignity of being treated differently based on what you paid. I’ve experienced all of it, from the inside and the outside, and it never stops being frustrating when the industry I love gets it wrong.
In 2019, I went back to hotels specifically because my daughter was diagnosed with Myasthenia Gravis, and the Hilton employee discount was the only thing that made our trips back and forth to Boston Children’s Hospital financially possible. What started as a necessity became a reminder: the right hospitality, at the right moment, can hold a family together. The wrong kind, or the absence of it, can make an already hard thing harder.
The name is mine, literally. Two last names I’ve carried at different points in my life, collapsed into one word. I set out to find something that was both me and travel, because I am travel. Hospitality has been my career, my context, and most of my adult life. The Rowd holds all of it, which is also kind of the whole point of what I write about: belonging somewhere.
This is a platform about the spaces where that feeling shows up, and the ones where it doesn’t. Hotels and the cities wrapped around them. Restaurants. The screen. Anywhere there’s an expectation of welcome and a story worth telling about whether it was met.
I’m also a journalism student. I went back to school full-time after my kids left for college and the house got very quiet, and it turns out an empty house is a good place to figure out what you actually want to say. Journalism gave me the framework. Hospitality gave me the eye. Fifteen years of being in rooms, running rooms, and writing about rooms gave me the rest.
The Rowd is my answer to all of it. I’m glad you’re here.
— Roketa
