Kodiak’s Best Western general manager Susan Johnson is one of Alaska’s Top 40 Under 40 this year. The Anchorage Chamber of Commerce award recognizes business professionals under 40 years old for their quality work and community leadership.

Johnson receives the award after only seven years as a professional hotel manager at the Kodiak Best Western Inn. She is not a professional hotel manager by formal training. Before starting at the hotel she was a fisheries biologist at the Fishery Industrial Technology Center (Fish Tech).

But she does have hotel work in her blood. Her father, Jack Johnson, owns the hotel she manages and he kept a number of motels and hotels while Susan was growing up in Eastern Oregon.

Jack Johnson now owns four other Best Westerns in Homer, Valdez, Lawton, Okla., and Chichasha, Okla. The hospitality trade is strong in other parts of the Johnson family as well. Susan’s brother manages the Homer Best Western, and her sister is an accountant for two of the family’s Alaska hotels.

Johnson and her father both moved to Kodiak in 1997, when Jack bought the Kodiak Inn and she started as a master’s student at Fish Tech. After graduating, Johnson worked in the Fish Tech lab for three years while also working part time at the Kodiak Inn.

Susan said as manager of the Kodiak Inn she has had to learn the business from the boiler room to the reservation system. But she pointed to Best Western’s customer services standards as the most important part of the job.

“It’s very important to solve customers’ problems before they leave the hotel,” she said. “After they leave, the way that they think about their experience permanently changes.”

Kodiak Chamber of Commerce executive director Deb King said the chamber nominated Johnson for the award because of the high-visibility projects she has worked on in Kodiak: The Kodiak Convention Center and the Chamber’s booster program Partners in Kodiak’s Economy (PIKE).

Converting an old auto dealership into the new convention center was another project Johnson worked on with her father. The convention center formally opened earlier this month, but has been holding events since ComFish. Johnson said she hopes the venue will attract more off-island groups like last month’s Harbormaster’s convention. She also envisions the convention center as a catering veue for the inn’s restaurant the Chart Room.

Johnson said she plans to remain a hotel manager for the foreseeable future. But she does not regret her Fish Tech work.

“I loved being a lab rat, but I don’t see myself going back to that anytime soon,” she said.

Instead, she said she is thinking about opening a sixth Best Western with her father in northern Washington state.

Johnson will collect her award on Jan. 14 at the Anchorage Chamber’s “Back to Business Conference.”

Previous Kodiak recipients of the Top 40 under 40 Award include Kodiak Area Native Association CEO Andy Teuber, fast-food entrepreneur Dan Rohrer and the Kodiak Daily Mirror’s ex-publisher Amy Willis.

Mirror writer Sam Friedman can be reached via e-mail at sfriedman@kodiakdailymirror.com.