Wharton School visit the Puntacana Ecological FOUNDATION.

If everyone will bear with me for a moment, I have a personal story to start today’s post off with.  A little over five years ago, I lived in a magical land known as southern New Jersey.  While there, I worked for several years preparing students for standardized tests.  In particular, I helped students with the GMAT, which as any MBA will tell you can be quite the ordeal.  The important bit, however, is that while preparing students for the GMAT I would always ask them if they had a business school they were applying to as their first choice.  Invariably, they would respond “The Wharton School.”  The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania has a reputation that precedes it, which is why it is such an honor to talk about some of the work they are doing with Puntacana. 

After all, when a world-class business school comes to Puntacana and wants to help us with marketing and strategy, we don’t say no.  We also don’t say no when dozens of other renowned institutions want to do research here, but that’s a story for another time.  Needless to say, we were honored when we found out they wanted to work on a project with the Puntacana Ecological Foundation, and we were thrilled that their focus would be the Ridgway’s Hawk, a topic we’ve discussed a couple of times already on this blog http://www.puntacanablogs.com/blog/protecting-ridgways-hawks-from-extinction.

What you may not know about the hawk, however, is that the Puntacana Ecological Foundation sponsors a segway tour that takes visitors through the grounds of the resort to sight see as well as gain some knowledge about the Ridgway’s hawk.  This tour is unique in that guests not only have exclusive access to the Ecological Reserve but are given an education on the reserve to go with the beautiful sights.  We always knew that this was a unique tour, and it was nice to see visitors from the Wharton School agree with us.

They pointed out several other ecotours we could and should be looking to as a model for how we do things, and they got us thinking about a few other things that we could be doing as well.  Given that the Ecological Foundation is a nonprofit, we were thrilled to have people with their incredible level of business knowledge help us out, and we will have a few neat things to reveal in the coming months.  When Puntacana collaborates with other places, magic seems to happen.