This month’s podcast episode features a friend of The Stanza, Marie-Louise Sciò, CEO and Creative Director of Pellicano Hotels. She has an uncanny ability to create worlds that people want to be a part of, and I wanted to uncover her decision making processes when it comes to that exact worldbuilding exercise. As Pellicano Hotels have taken on private equity investment, and as they’ve recently acquired two additional assets, this interview takes place at an interesting junction of the Pellicano Hotels story: from independent and family-owned to scaling with institutional capital.

I hope you enjoy the episode and as always, feel free to write to me with your thoughts.

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Nadine

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Part 1: Mass Distribution is the Antithesis of Desirability with Marc Lotenberg, founder of Dorsia

Marc Lotenberg, Founder of Dorsia, argues that the operators who will define the next decade of hospitality are the ones who have understood that reach and relevance are not the same thing, and that the pursuit of one is often the fastest way to destroy the other.

In Part I of this episode, Marc explains why the new generation of wealthy consumers has stopped equating luxury with status and what most operators are getting wrong as a result, what happens to the guest experience when a restaurant can’t hide behind alcohol sales, and why opening reservations to anyone and everyone is the fastest way to lose what made a venue worth booking in the first place.

Thank you Dorsia for making this episode possible.

To learn more about Dorsia’s hospitality tech, get in touch: knox@dorsia.com

Download Dorsia to get access to impossible tables and events here (code: THESTANZA)

Follow Dorsia on Instagram here

Part II: Building the Pellicano World: Scaling Without Sacrificing Soul and Authenticity with Marie-Louise Sciò

Marie-Louise’s interview starts at 18:22

Marie-Louise Sciò is the CEO and Creative Director of Pellicano Hotels, the group her father Roberto Sciò founded after acquiring Il Pellicano in 1979 from the couple who built it. Trained in architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design, Marie-Louise took over creative direction of the property in 2004, starting with a single bathroom renovation and expanding into every touchpoint of the guest experience, from uniforms to tableware to the archive-driven design language the group is now known for.

The portfolio has grown from Il Pellicano alone to include Mezzatorre on Ischia and La Posta Vecchia outside Rome, with two more properties in the pipeline: La Badia in Umbria and La Suvera in Tuscany. That expansion followed a €200M partnership with Aermont Capital, structured to take the group from three properties to a target of ten to twelve while keeping design, brand, and guest experience decisions in-house. Few operators have built a hospitality brand with this much mythology attached to it, and fewer still have done it while actively resisting the key-maximizing logic that typically comes with institutional capital.

Marie-Louise’s thesis is that scale and soul are not opposing forces, as long as room count stays intentionally small and every property is allowed its own distinct identity rather than a repeatable format.

In this episode, Nadine sits down with Marie-Louise for a rare look inside how Pellicano built its mythology, and what it takes to scale that world without flattening it.

INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS

• The sink-or-swim test her father gave her: one bathroom renovation, no formal hospitality training, and a mandate to prove she could deliver a return

• Marie-Louise’s unfiltered take on copycats

• How the €200M Aermont Capital partnership came together, and what made it different from the other funds that approached the family first

• Navigating the tension between a private equity return horizon and a family hotel business built over sixty years

• The case against key-maximizing, and why Pellicano has refused to scale room count even when the underwriting would support it

• The case study of Mezzatorre: opening a hotel in an emerging resort market

• Marie-Louise’s view on the shift in what defines luxury

Learn more about Pellicano Hotels here

Connect with Marie-Louise on Instagram

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Under the leadership of Richard Leuenberger, the Palace employs nearly 700 people to operate 13 F&B outlets and163 keys during peak season. When I first met Richard, I could immediately tell that he innately understands hospitality and the art of taking care of others. Richard started in housekeeping at the Four Seasons George V, and has worked his way up through various hospitality functions in Europe, Asia, and the US. There is a Swiss precision to how he runs things at the Palace, which is almost required to manage one of the most logistically and operationally complex hotels I’ve come across in my career.

While the Palace is known for its anticipatory service and thoughtful guest entertainment, the history of the Palace is also a fascinating real estate story. Caspar Badrutt, the son of notable St. Moritz real estate developer Johannes Badrutt, acquired the Beau-Rivage hotel in 1884 and officially opened it as the Badrutt’s Palace in 1896. Since then, the hotel has expanded across five adjacent parcels connected by an efficient underground tunnel system. In addition to the hotel component of the overall assemblage, the Palace also owns 20 fully-leased ground-level retail spaces and over 500 apartment units of staff housing, creating a fully self-contained ‘resort within a resort town’. The most recent addition to the Palace is the CHF 70M redevelopment of the Serlas Wing, which houses 25 keys designed with families in mind.

Throughout the history of the Badrutt’s Palace, the hotel has remained family-owned and mostly independent, save for when Rosewood briefly managed the asset from 1999 - 2003. Today, Anikó Badrutt is the majority shareholder of the Badrutt’s Palace.

You started at the Four Seasons George V in Paris — and that happened around 9/11, when you were rerouted from New York. Tell me a memorable moment or lesson from that period of your career.

When I was graduating from school, I had worked an internship in New York, and I was interviewing with Four Seasons with the intention of going back there. That was a few months before 9/11. Afterwards they said, look, it’s going to be quite difficult with the J-1 visa you have — but we might have something in Paris. So I went to see them, and I had a great interview with Didier Le Calvez, the GM at the time. He said: if you want to know anything about hotels, you should work in housekeeping. I don’t know if that was out of convenience or actually meant, but in hindsight I learned all the basics I needed to start being successful in luxury hospitality. It was a good school.

What did housekeeping teach you that you keep with you in your guiding principles today?

A few things. Learning how a room is made is the basics of what a hotel is about. But what I learned at Four Seasons in general — because I worked there for quite a while afterwards — is how important standards are, and consistency of standards, and understanding that that’s the floor. That’s where you start. If that is not there, there is nothing. Then you realize that if you follow the standards and get into more detail, that’s where the real difference is made — in the detail. Precision, consistency, and detail is what I took from Four Seasons.

And in housekeeping, you understand how hard that job is — where people find appreciation, what motivates them. A lot of people would say you do housekeeping because you need to make money, but there are really people who are passionate about making a room someone’s home. It was my first leadership exposure to people who do this for a living. Back then, I was hired as a floor supervisor, but before I could get my first floor to supervise, I had to be able to hold ten housekeeping credits myself — work a week cleaning ten departure rooms a day, myself. That was a very important lesson: to understand what the job actually is. To this day, I think Four Seasons has the most consistent approach to standards, to sequences of service, to the basics of the business.

You also started at Badrutt’s Palace in 2008 as Director of F&B — then took a break and came back, and we’ll talk about what you did in between. When we met, you mentioned that at peak season Badrutt’s Palace operates thirteen F&B outlets, which is insane for one hotel.

It’s insane.

What did that role teach you about hotel F&B management? Hotel F&B is notoriously difficult to get right — a lot of people see it as a cost center, something you have to have just to have it. But it’s clear that your outlets are a focal point of the St. Moritz community and a huge part of the culture there.

When I first started as F&B director here, I came in with the understanding that those restaurants were to some extent an amenity — but they were extremely popular, with people from everywhere. And I realized it’s because those concepts grew organically. There was a purpose and a reason why Chesa Veglia was bought back in the thirties and how it was operated. It was always very important that these restaurants kept their identity. We would put a layer of the hotel’s values on top — the processes, the things we had in common — but everything else in the operation was quite different. Everything from design to menus to music had to be truly the identity of that restaurant.

When I first came in, I struggled to understand the business case. I could see a P&L, but I didn’t initially see — is this even profitable? Then I realized: yes, it has to be profitable, but some have to be more profitable than others, because not all the restaurants have the same purpose. The Grand Hall in the center of the building is a restaurant and a bar and a lounge, but at the end of the day it’s also the social energy of the hotel. Since COVID we’ve operated it with reservations — we don’t really take walk-ins — because we want to be in control of the space. It’s that important to how the hotel feels. Everybody used to call it the living room of St. Moritz. It had the big window, all the elements everyone would want to see and photograph — but more importantly, it was where you would go when you’re not in your room, and where you’d start seeing and interacting with other people. We realized the value of the experience is not just the room or the food on the plate — it’s the feeling you get when you’re there, and the people you’re around. That’s what leaves a memory behind.

Operating F&B in that hotel requires good reporting systems, good reservation management, and understanding how guests travel through the house. Back then it was quite basic, and the most reliable system was the concierge and the restaurant managers themselves. The concierge would have all the reservations in a book, and if a guest had booked Chesa Veglia but also Matsuhisa and another restaurant for the same night because she wasn’t sure where she wanted to go, he would stop her at breakfast and say — where are you actually going tonight? That was a good interaction, and it showed the guest: these people are paying attention. Now we have systems, such as a guest experience team doing the digital journey and itineraries — but you need those systems.

What was always important is that these restaurants are coherent, but it’s not sameness. You don’t go into Matsuhisa and get the same thing as the next restaurant. You should get great service, and the basic values of the hotel have to be felt — we’re quite obsessed about those. If you go to a Matsuhisa in Mykonos versus at the Palace, although the food doesn’t change, it’s still very different, and I think it’s because ours is connected to those values, and to the structures — the meetings, the time we spend together. All the restaurant managers have true responsibility and accountability for their restaurants, including the P&Ls. That’s a different relationship from an F&B director saying “this is the guy doing my all-day dining and my breakfast,” where it’s all one grey mass of food and beverage. That was never the case in this hotel. And I can’t claim I created it — it’s always been this way. We’ve just tried to sharpen it.

We added Paradiso, which we didn’t have before, and that was a good exercise in seeing how it fits in. After COVID we basically decided: this ecosystem of F&B is great to have. It’s very expensive to have. It’s a lot of operating risk because there are a lot of employees involved. But it’s unique — it’s a USP — and we should protect it as our ecosystem. If a guest books the Palace, he gets access to those restaurants; he gets access to the destination. If he’s not in our hotel, he might get access — but he also might not. We made a very conscious decision: we want to operate amazing restaurants, but connected to the hotel and its value proposition.

I love what you said about the Grand Hall, because that space is a lot of the mythology of Badrutt’s Palace. I also want to talk about what happened between your two tenures. You were at Ritz-Carlton in Asia, overseeing twenty-five hotels. I’m sure you saw hotels that were struggling. When you walked into a struggling hotel, what did you notice first?

One of the things I would always ask first: what are your open management positions? Because it usually tells you a lot. The numbers — the P&L — will tell you what is broken. But the why you usually find in the people. A total giveaway is key management positions that haven’t been filled in four to six months. As a VP of operations, I would speak first to the general manager and see what they think is wrong with the hotel, then see how much alignment there is between what’s seen from the general manager’s seat and what’s seen from the restaurant manager’s or F&B director’s seat. If there’s misalignment, it’s very easy to find things.

There’s no single common thing. You can see it in the numbers immediately — if the STR wasn’t where it should be, or huge staff turnover. But a good indicator is alignment in senior management, and open leadership positions are a good giveaway. Some of my colleagues say you can always tell by whether a light bulb is out, whether people are paying attention. But go to Japan — there will never be a light bulb out, and hotels can still perform very poorly.

What usually causes fully occupied hotels to be not profitable?

If a hotel is full and not profitable, it mostly has to do with the room mix and the guest mix. You’re controlling what type of business you want in, and that decides your other types of spend in the hotel — but it also determines who the other guests are. If your mix is not correct — if you have periods where you basically need to pack the hotel full of groups, and you don’t have a good group journey in terms of putting individual guests next to group guests; if you start making corporate contracts that are absolutely unprofitable from the beginning, just so you can show your owners you have revenue — these things are more common than one might think. And the profitability comes from the rooms. That’s what drives the business, at least in Europe for sure, with labor cost the way it is.

And in Asia?

In Asia, F&B is more profitable due to labor cost and food cost. There are hotels that do fifty-fifty — literally fifty percent of GOP from rooms and fifty from F&B — which you will never see in Europe.

What do you think Asian hospitality gets right that European grand hotels could learn from?

The service itself is team-dependent — there’s an understanding of collective success that doesn’t exist the same way here. I remember when I first started there, people would set goals for their department, and I was used to setting goals for individuals. There was always a drive to bring it back to the group. Initially I thought it was because nobody wants to be accountable. But the reality is it’s about the collective idea of serving. Everybody feels they are participating equally, even if their contribution is from the back of house or the front of house. This understanding of a common goal to serve a guest is much more strongly embedded in the culture.

In Europe you have more individuality in service, and that’s also why you have more inconsistency. Take Italian hotels — Italian hotels are fabulous. But you can have a fabulous experience or a terrible experience based on one person serving you. That will rarely happen to you in Asia. We’re trying to learn from it — as a group you can achieve much more. We have systems, like how we handle complaints and glitches, where people see they can have an impact on a guest who had a poor experience in one department — somehow we all feel responsible for solving it. There needs to be more moments like that in the daily lineups and briefings, where we talk about what we can achieve as a group. In Asia that’s just in the DNA, whether you go to Bali or China or Japan. That’s the one big difference, I would say.

I want to switch gears and talk about the Serlas Wing. Before we started recording, we talked about how you’re reducing the number of keys, which I found fascinating. When we met, we toured both the main structure and the Serlas Wing, which is more contemporary — Loro Piana upholstery, if I remember correctly?

Yes — and it’s the designer who does all the Bulgari hotels, Antonio Citterio. The furniture is B&B Italia or Flexform, mostly designed by him. The style is very contemporary, so yes, it’s very different.

Very Milanese. That wing took seven years, and as we discussed, planning permission and construction have an additional layer of complexity up on the mountain. Walk me through the process behind the Serlas Wing development.

The Serlas Wing was an opportunity, because in its place there used to be a staff house, for thirty years. We knew this was prime real estate. It already had a kind of tunnel connecting to the hotel, but it couldn’t really be renovated. So we figured out how to get better staff housing — I’m sure we’ll come to that — and a permit was put in to build residences, actually. That was the original permit, before I even started at the Palace. The original thought was: build it, sell all the apartments, and then we have capital to invest into the hotel.

When I started with this project there was a basic design, and the law changed twice while we were in the planning phase. I suggested to the board that instead of selling the ‘family silver’ when we were doing quite okay, we should address a demand we were hearing from guests that we really could not service through the hotel, because of the limitations of the main building’s structure. Then we hired Antonio Citterio, who has a very deep connection with St. Moritz — his daughter was born here, he has a house twenty minutes away. This was just before COVID. He helped me address what I originally wanted to achieve: have these multigenerational families continue what we’d been building the last couple of years, with a room product and an experience that fits their lifestyle better than the main hotel does.

If you wanted rooms here over Christmas and New Year’s as a family with two kids, you would get two forty-square-metre rooms. You’d go out of the room, into the elevator, out into the lobby — and there you are, fully exposed to the craziness, the black tie, everything going on. A lot of our guests said: this is all great for New Year’s Eve, but then it’s a little too much. These are guests who might typically stay in an Aman, or a Capella, or a Patina. They said: we like the action, we like the social life, all my friends are here — but I also want to go home. I don’t want to sleep in the nightclub.

Having that building next door meant we could design a space people would spend more time in. More square metres, bigger living rooms, the ability to go in and out without being seen, without going through the lobby — but still not an apartment, an Airbnb, a residence. We consciously decided from the beginning, and I told this to Antonio Citterio: I don’t want to build residences. Residences are perceived as a secondary product in terms of service, and that’s not what we do. Full service, full Palace keys. The guests who come here expect exactly that, and it needs to be staffed for that, and the business model needs to work. That was the original brief.

But we already had a construction permit submitted for a completely different building. So we needed to go back and convince the commune that what we were now proposing was much better — the volume is exactly the same. I took Antonio Citterio to the building commission of the commune and we made a presentation. They’re full of architects and building people. Going to them very actively, making them part of the project, making them understand: this is the center of the town, this building will change the center of the town — and selling them that it would increase the quality of the street in general by putting a really fine architectural structure there.

Then bringing on the right team to do the planning was a huge task. The architect said: I only design in BIM. That sounds normal if you’re building a skyscraper in Shanghai, but not for a five-storey building in St. Moritz. So you need to find planners who know how to work in BIM, builders who know how to do that. We had a project manager on our side in charge of the planners, and a building-site management company. But we couldn’t do what you’d call total contractor management — sign off and say here’s fifty, sixty, seventy million and it cannot cost more. What happens a lot when you build luxury hospitality is that the drawings four years out are not precise enough for a total construction company to give you a good quote. You would just lose control of the quality. So we went the complicated route: project management, building management, different supplier packages depending on what it was — fit-out, part fit-out, and so on. And we’re not allowed to build during the season, so you have to build off-season, which made the project more complex and of course more expensive.

Can you share how much was invested to build the Serlas Wing?

It was seventy million, for twenty-five keys. But it has retail on the ground floor, and a three-storey parking structure underneath — and building into the mountain, holding up the entire Corviglia mountain while you do it, has a cost. We didn’t have much choice; there’s legal compliance — to build a building like that, you need to build parking.

In terms of financing and the business case: to get it started, especially during COVID, we said, look, we don’t want to sell the building, because we want to use it to help our operation scale, and to get the right mix of product — with a long-term vision. Not “this has to return within seven years,” but knowing we’re going to hold this asset for a very long time. So if we were going to bring in partners to help finance it — which eventually we did — we needed to do it properly. We sold three keys to three different individuals. They’re guests of ours, and they said: I want to buy it, but I’m really not there all the time; I don’t want to be involved in the design, and I want you to operate it so it’s successful for the hotel. The design is identical to the other keys, which makes it easy to maintain, manage, and move in and out of inventory. That secured part of the financing. Then we had bank financing, which is great in Switzerland and obviously we presented a business case showing it would make enough money to pay it off.

I had no idea you sold three of the units — so you own twenty-two, plus those three. In terms of room mix in the Serlas Wing, are most of them suites?

Most of them are suites. The rooms face the mountain at the back — the corner rooms; the middle of the back is mostly building core, the tech, the elevators. The back corner is mostly the connecting room that turns a one-bedroom suite into a two-bedroom suite. Through the center of the building, on four of the floors, you have a double room which you can connect either way. So mostly suites, but very intelligently designed to connect — some families take a whole floor, and we can connect pretty much the whole floor and key off the elevator.

A really important design decision, which I struggled with for a couple of weeks and discussed a lot with Antonio Citterio: the original building had a lobby on the ground floor as the main entrance. The previous architect’s idea was that somebody would check in and then be brought across the street or through the tunnel. Antonio said: we need to make sure the perceived main entrance to this building is actually on minus one, not the ground floor. So he designed a lobby that starts on minus one and is triple height — so that from the moment you leave the elevator in the main building and cross to the other side, there’s always something happening, a place to go to, with natural daylight. That was one of the best decisions we could have made. It feels like you’re walking through a hallway to get to your room — it doesn’t feel like you’re going to a completely different building, which is exactly what we didn’t want. We wanted people to feel part of the hotel.

Connecting Chesa Veglia was the last thing on top. During the project we studied the restrictions we had with the mountain and realized it’s not so far from Chesa Veglia — there was an opportunity to break through on that side. I often say I could have skipped the building and just built the tunnel and it would have earned me huge brownie points with our guests. I didn’t think it would have that much impact, honestly. But the guests are loving it. First, returning guests feel: these people are really reinvesting the money. Yes, I’m paying more than last year, yes there’s inflation — but they’re putting the money back in. Guests see it. And they love going up to Chesa Veglia when it’s minus twenty outside — even people from outside valet park at Chesa Veglia, have dinner, and then come down to the bar through the tunnel. It’s a really special journey.

We’ve talked about multigenerational guests, and I think it’s a genuinely interesting trend — millennials and soon Gen Z are having families, so you need more space for younger families, and that’s only going to continue. Beyond ample space, intimacy, discretion, and the optionality to be part of the mix when you want to — how would this generation of travelers define luxury? What makes a luxurious guest experience, from a design and experience perspective?

From a design perspective, privacy and space are two very important elements, as we discussed. In room design itself, I don’t think things have drastically changed, honestly — except working spaces. In a traditional room you’d have a bed and a place to sit or put your clothes on, but not really a working space. That has changed; people work always and they’re highly mobile.

But in designing the whole experience, what has changed is how they interact with the hotel — when they choose to step into a human interaction, and what the expectation is towards that interaction, and how the digital access has to work. They expect full digital access to all services at all times, and it needs to be super responsive. That’s something we had to invest quite a lot in. But then when they step into the lobby or go to the concierge and want the human interaction, it has to be very personalized and of extremely high quality. It actually takes a lot more to earn the trust of an UHNW 35 year-old than a 55 year-old. You can be very good at the concierge desk, but you also need to be good digitally, and that trust can be broken much more easily than before.

Before, loyalty would build up — if you had one great interaction, something really memorable from the lobby or the concierge or breakfast, that was kind of good enough. Now: you have a great breakfast experience, your waiter gets you, they know what you want — and then you go on WhatsApp with guest experience to arrange a trip to Paradiso, and that is terrible. That is worth exactly as much in terrible as the other was worth in great. That’s new. Before, if a phone call for a reservation didn’t feel quite right, it was okay — you’d come down and speak to someone. That has shifted.

This summer we created a new department — six people on shift, nine in the department — who do nothing but pre-arrival itineraries and WhatsApp. Hotels that want to do well with these guests will have to perform on both sides, and think very carefully about which human interactions are really unique and how to ensure their people can deliver them. We took all that reservation volume and pre-arrival communication away from the concierge — because we wanted the concierge to do their job. When they’re there, they can really be there, not half in an email.

That makes a lot of sense. I was reflecting on my recent stays where there was a pre-arrival person — not “download an app” or “fill out this form,” but an actual person asking what I wanted from the stay. And I think the reason this generation has such high expectations is that it’s incredibly exposed and has seen the best of the best. When one thing disappoints, you feel it wasn’t worth it.

Wasn’t worth it — and you’re going to talk about it. But what’s also surprising: if we have a group activity, they love it. They’re the first ones there, engaging — even a yoga class. They have a great time, because they’re looking to put themselves in an environment with five or six people where the likelihood that something interesting will happen is very high. The same thing happens in the Grand Hall.

The Hall has evolved over time, but its purpose has never changed: it remains the social heart of the hotel. Everything is carefully considered, yet the design should never become the main event. This winter, the new bar will add a more intimate layer to the space, but always in service of the same idea: bringing people together and encouraging conversation and unexpected encounters. We are not against design; we are against design becoming the reason people are there.

When people talk to me about what ultra-luxury is, the first thing I always hear is Aman. I like Aman — personally I’m a big fan. I like being somewhere a little off, fully immersed in the destination. But that’s not the kind of hotel we are. We are a highly social luxury experience, and one that’s not scared of being that. You can get it wrong much more easily once you start making very strong decisions about music, about lighting — once you start making decisions like that, you get opinions. It’s not the standard answer when you ask what an ultra-luxury experience is — people tend to point to a more controlled environment, an Aman or a Cheval Blanc, where the experience is very much designed. I’m not saying we’re free-flow — we have a very well-designed experience — but it’s a very social experience, and it has that human element of the other guests. That makes it difficult to manage, but also interesting.

I’m remembering a moment in the elevator when we ran into a guest — clearly a repeat guest, you greeted her by name. I noticed an interesting balance: Swiss formality, but warm and familiar. That balance is really hard, but it seems like the modus operandi for you and your staff. Tell me about your philosophy on managing the relationship with guests.

It comes down to a basic understanding of service — and this is genuinely difficult with people joining the industry now. When I joined, I felt: I like to serve and be of service. Nowadays the perception — sometimes from guests, but mostly from people joining the industry — is that serving puts you below somebody else. My philosophy is: we are here to show what can be done in luxury. We’re proud of what we do. Nobody else will do it the way we do it. This is who we are — this is how we’re defined. The guest is a guest — they’re coming into our universe, and we’re going to do the best we can to offer this special service, this special experience. If you have that mindset, then — as you say — you can be friendly, but you won’t be friends. And you need to have that.

Things like uniforms make it easier in a traditional hotel. When somebody steps into the doorman’s uniform, they step into a persona. Sometimes I catch people checking their uniform, making sure the buttons are right — it tells you something about how they see themselves. It creates the formality and discipline required not to get too close to the guest. Some guests will want to be very close to you — but you have other guests.

I remember telling a new F&B director a couple of years back: your challenge is to go to the breakfast room and speak to the guests — and I give you a limit, you can’t stay at a table longer than two minutes. He said, why? Because if I go to one table and speak to them for five minutes, I have four other tables thinking: why didn’t he speak to us? You have to have that balance. As a GM, even more so — you want to be of service, but you’re also being observed a lot.

And when you only have two minutes, you have to listen — and not listen to respond. You listen to understand. You give information that is concise, and hopefully you learn something, so when you see them again tomorrow, you know more. A waiter who notices what a guest had for breakfast — yes, we have a protocol, but most of the time they’ll make an effort to be that person’s waiter again, because they’ll provide better service, and ultimately that’s the reward. Whether you’re a GM or a waiter, the reward is a happy guest — seeing a guest come back and building that relationship is the greatest thing you can have.

Speaking of talent — the type of guest that comes to Badrutt’s Palace is demanding, with very high expectations. How do you attract and retain staff who can perform at that level? Good staff is hard to find — I think most operators in Europe would say that. Tell me about your employment philosophy.

We have very strong family values, which you feel immediately when you start in the hotel. Part of it comes from staff coming back for many, many years — you always have that base of people carrying your culture, and it is very strong. For somebody coming in, it’s refreshing, because it doesn’t really exist in many places anymore. Then there’s us as an employer doing what we say we’re going to do: we pay you on time, we give you a great contract, and we make the employee journey something worth aspiring to. Nothing in our employee journey is on paper — everything’s digital. We have our own Facebook-type app; they have access to their own files, their scheduling tools. For the generation that wants to do most of the jobs we offer, they don’t want barriers; they don’t want it to be difficult to work here.

And then there’s the culture that feels safe and supportive, embedded in values, with people who have stood the test of time — showing that even after thirty seasons you can still be engaged, still be happy, and still care about doing something of super high quality.

Then there’s seasonality, which everybody always says is very difficult. In winter season we have six hundred and ninety employees now, and in summer four hundred, so you have to recruit every time. But we feel we’ve hit something quite good, because for people who want to work in hospitality at twenty-two, twenty-five — it’s not a huge commitment. You’re committing for six months. That’s it. My observation is that the level of commitment at that age is very different from ten or fifteen years ago. People want to acquire a skill and an experience, and then have a different experience. Committing to something for five years is more difficult now. I see it even with younger friends — “let’s have dinner on Thursday” is already a level of commitment that’s sometimes difficult to get. Maybe it’s a bit of a stereotype. But a season has a beginning and an end, and that creates a different type of energy than something repetitive every day. We go in and say: there’s this event and that event, we’re doing all these exciting things — and in April it’s finished. We close the door and go home.

It’s like a sprint. A marathon with a beginning and an end.

Yes. And even so, the average length of employment, even for seasonal employees, is eight and a half years — a long time for a hotel like ours. It shows people get hooked on this thing. I’m hooked on it — opening a hotel twice a year is super exciting, that bit of adrenaline, doing the programming, seeing if it works out.

Do you have housing on the property for staff?

The housing thing is a whole other world. We have five staff houses — over five hundred units total. Two of the buildings close to the hotel, by the big market in town, have a hundred and sixty-three units that were designed like a three-star hotel: nice studios with kitchens. In season, employees can book them themselves — they get a QR code to retrieve their key automatically, and they have the same Wi-Fi and TV you’d have in the hotel. Off-season, when we’re down to four hundred employees, we rent them out as self-check-in hotels on Booking.com — they’re called Townhouse St. Moritz — and our year-round housekeeping does the basics, to offset some of the cost of that infrastructure.

If you wanted to open a hotel in St. Moritz, it’s almost impossible — you cannot find housing for the staff. The market is limited by the land available, and once you have the land, it’s limited by where your staff is going to sleep.

I also want to talk about the fact that Badrutt’s Palace was once a Rosewood hotel — it returned to independence in 2003, a path no comparable European hotel has taken. You arrived five years after the de-flagging, in 2008, but you’ve also worked for properties flagged by major brands, so you’ve had both sides of the experience. What does a flag genuinely add to a hotel like Badrutt’s Palace, and what makes independence worth it?

You have to look at what time it was a Rosewood. What did the world look like in 1998, 1999, and why would you want a brand? Back then you could say: you get immediate distribution, structure, exposure. Then ask yourself, in 2026, which of those elements are really relevant for a hotel that has been here for a hundred and thirty years? Is it really going to give me better distribution? Probably not — distribution has changed in general. Better marketing? Probably not — they’re also marketing fifty other hotels. So you have to see what the benefit really is. I think a lot of hotels are considering stepping out of a brand, or not flagging from the beginning, because the asset is special and there are other ways.

I can put on a different hat — as executive committee member at Leading Hotels, a company that has transformed tremendously over the last fifteen years. When I first came to Badrutt’s Palace with my Ritz-Carlton and Four Seasons background, I looked at my P&L and said: what is this? That’s Leading Hotels. That’s a lot of money — let’s get rid of that. That was my first reaction. Then I realized that back then it was a distribution organization. That has shifted. Now it’s a company whose goal is to provide independent hotels the tools to stay independent. That’s the purpose of the company, and for me that was a more compelling reason, because there are things I truly need help with. The digital assessment: how do I optimize my website, my booking engine, my GPT exposure? Leading Hotels might not have the skill to do all of that themselves, but they have the skill to identify the right supplier for the size of hotel I am and the markets I’m talking to. It’s more of a consultant on my side.

I don’t want to go against the chain hotels here, but if you’re an UHNW traveler who wants to go to a special destination in Europe, what is the compelling argument to go to a major flag versus a Villa d’Este, for example, if you want to see Lake Como? The argument that the experience isn’t quality-wise good enough doesn’t really exist anymore — a lot of these hotels have the standards, the LQA standards, the level. Unless I go somewhere completely remote and I want to make sure my water is safe and my food is good — then okay, I go to a brand. But if I want to truly explore, I would rather take the risk — at least I know it’s a great location, and local people operate it. That gives me better excitement and confidence. But it’s different for every person.

I do think a flag brings you distribution to a certain extent. But the loyalty programs, as much as they can be seen from an owner’s perspective as something good — I think they’re terrible when it comes to true luxury. I think they’re ruining luxury completely. I’ve seen cases where new hotels receive horrible reviews just after opening. This is because half the people are there with points, and therefore the hotel has to jack up the rates so that after the points they still make enough money. It’s not a good system for luxury.

There are other interesting concepts one should really look at over the next few years in ultra-luxury. Look at companies like Hauser & Wirth with Artfarm — I think they have something. To a certain extent it can be like timeshare, but on an extremely high level, with a very high service component. Somebody will come up with something in that direction — you can travel to incredible locations, have incredible service, but not be in a hotel. The piece that was missing before was technology, and now it’s much easier to do all of that.

Other than that, staying independent for a hotel like us has lots of advantages. As an operator, the way we make decisions about investments and operations — we can be much faster. And we need to be. If I go into this coming winter with the same strategy as last winter, I will fail. Maybe not this year, but over the mid-term it will be a disaster. Moments ago, I had a meeting about New Year’s Eve and the entertainment for the week before and after — we’re selecting people. We’re building a new bar in the lobby with a designer. We’re redoing Matsuhisa for this winter with Martin Brudnizki — it will be done by early December. We have those twenty-five rooms. We would never be able to move at this speed if there were more people with opinions about how it’s done. It’s a huge competitive advantage, actually.

When you say shareholders — I read this story that because [Hansjürg] Badrutt didn’t have an heir, he left his shares to the hotelier who ran the Palace, who I believe still sits on the board.

Yes — Mr. Wiedemann. Mr. Badrutt has passed, but Mrs. Badrutt is still very much alive — she’s 96. The Delegate of the Board, Mr. Wiedemann, will inherit those shares, but he has not yet. She still holds them. But the direction the hotel is taking is agreed on: the legacy of the hotel is the purpose of running it. We want to make sure it’s still here in a hundred years. Having inherited it that way — they didn’t have children, and they wanted to make sure it continues the way it does now. We have a governance structure, but the belief that an asset like this can only keep gaining value if it stays relevant — and, with that, keeps investing — is powerful, and at the end of the day it also works for the owner.

Maybe the learning the Badrutts had in the eighties is: once you lose the relevancy, you lose the market positioning, and with that you lose everything. If you want to play in that league, you need to keep investing with discipline, and you need to keep listening to your guests and making sure that what you bring to the table is something people want to experience. I’m very fortunate as an MD to work in a hotel that thinks this way. But I think it’s the future for many assets that want to operate as ultra-luxury.

Was there ever a time during your tenure that an investor made an insane offer to buy Badrutt’s Palace? I’m sure there must be stories…

There are stories, but I can’t tell you anything, unfortunately. I would love to. When you have a hotel like this, there’s a bit of a myth around it. Ask somebody to do a valuation, get all the professionals in — the value based on earnings, based on building value, and then what somebody is willing to pay for it: two very different things. Any time something happens in this hotel, there are immediately rumors. We bought Paradiso — we did the closing three weeks ago; they were a tenant before. If I told you how many phone calls I got about which Qatari or Greek had bought it — it’s crazy. But it’s also nice. It shows people love talking about the hotel; it shows the hotel is relevant to them. There are lots of guests out there who love this hotel and would probably buy part of it just so it stays the same — so it doesn’t change its purpose.

Because, as you know — I read your blog, but also from your personal experience — ownership very much decides the long-term success of a luxury hotel. Across all the different hotels I’ve worked for, even if ownership doesn’t directly interfere in operations, it sets the tone of where you’re going. If somebody owns it with a seven-year cycle in his head, you’re not going to get the same thing. It’s not possible.

I want to end with a final question about your philosophy. What’s fascinating about Badrutt’s Palace is that it’s clearly a living, breathing entity and it has mythology. The scale of what you invest back into the property after every season is quite unique. So: what is your fundamental philosophy behind a heritage hotel that has maintained commercial success and cultural relevance over this many years? Why does Badrutt’s Palace remain a case study for European hospitality?

Initially, when somebody builds a hotel, it’s an idea. And the idea of building a palace in the mountains was by itself something crazy back then — but it’s also what inspires guests and people to learn about it. The Palace shows that heritage and history can be maintained and kept relevant today. It’s not really the building that matters, but the idea behind it, and the kind of experience people are looking for. The imagination of the guests is driving what we do in the hotel. The commitment to investing continuously, to strong people, to independent decision-making, and to commercial discipline behind it — I don’t have a secret recipe, but it has a lot to do with preserving something special and keeping it relevant in the present. And the vehicle behind it is the people. There are so many memories in here for people — that keeps guests coming back and keeps the myth going. It’s always what you remember that determines the quality of your experience. So we live a lot from people’s memories — and from creating new things every season.

Thanks for reading this interview. For more of The Stanza, subscribe to the newsletter and follow on Instagram.

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Thank you for sharing your thoughtful questions with me - I’ve answered the ones below which I think will give everyone the most value.

Best,

Nadine

In today’s newsletter:

• Pivoting into hospitality and other career advice

• An investor’s perspective on strong concept with less proven operator vs. generic concept with proven operator

• Solving problems versus finding white space in hospitality

• Number 1 non-negotiable in choosing the right capital partner

Read previous issues of The Stanza here.

The Stanza is hiring an Associate Producer to help build the next phase of The Stanza podcast. Apply here.

Advertise with The Stanza Classifieds: via classifieds@thestanzamedia.com.

Career advice

Advice for a REPE professional looking to pivot into hospitality?

It’s not a hard or complicated transition – understanding deal dynamics and how to acquire and manage the underlying real estate are fundamental skills that give you an edge. What’s unique about hospitality as an asset class within RE is that it’s a daily operating business (vs office, multifamily, industrial, etc with longer leases) and therefore has a layer of complexity to it.

My honest caveat is to wait out the hospitality bull run to test if you genuinely want to do it, while you maintain your current job. Firstly, the world is rapidly changing with AI and it’s unclear the extent of how it will change the employment landscape. Secondly, hospitality – all sides of the business – is really not for everyone, and these days due to all the hype surrounding the industry, I’m seeing a lot of new entrants who only see it from a “brand” or “design” perspective. Hospitality is about taking care of others, and a lot of it is not glamorous. Whether you’re an owner dealing with headaches such as building issues or difficult guests, or an operator who has to motivate staff serving wealthy demanding guests while getting paid relatively little…these things are not advertised as the sexy version of hospitality we’re seeing everywhere today. But it’s the daily reality of the business. It’s also not the quickest nor easiest way to make a lot of money. As long as you go into it with eyes wide open, and if your motives are truly aligned, then you’ll consider it the best pivot of your life.

Best advice you have received for people who are just starting?

For anyone starting out in their careers, my advice is always the same. Approach employment as being paid to learn and make the most out of the opportunity to be a sponge. Learn how to ask really good questions, and you’ll not only receive great answers but mentors who want to teach you. Learn the fundamental skills, but also focus on the soft skills that will give you a real edge: precision in your work, managing relationships, and being a good communicator. Beyond that, take a view that you’ll become an expert at one thing and you’ll never worry about falling behind in your career.

Thoughts on building

When an investor group is choosing between a strong operator with a generic concept and a strong concept with a less proven operator, which risk is cheaper to fix once the money’s been committed?

Read more

Today’s letter is a short one.

Some news: The Stanza is gaining incredible momentum and therefore I’m hiring an Associate Producer. If you or someone you know has excellent work ethic and a natural knack for storytelling, please see here for more info and to apply.

I typically receive a lot of questions in my inbox and in DMs about hospitality investing, brand strategy, and how deals actually get done, and I don't always have a good place to answer them. So consider this an open call: send me your questions about hospitality business and strategy, capital markets, guest experience, whatever you're actually trying to figure out, and I'll answer a selection in an upcoming issue.

Reply to this email or write to: newsletter@thestanzamedia.com with your questions (and make them good!)

Thank you for being part of The Stanza,

Nadine

Here’s how to get the most out of The Stanza.

SEEKING BOUTIQUE HOTEL OPERATOR, ZELL AM SEE, AUSTRIA

Schloss Prielau is a historic castle hotel with 10 keys on the shores of Lake Zell in Austria’s Salzburg region — one of the few genuinely rare assets in the alpine luxury market that is available to operate right now.

The property is fully permitted and operational, with an adjacent restaurant, and is available under a lease arrangement. There is no construction timeline, no planning process, and no repositioning required from the ground up. If you’ve been wanting to operate a boutique hotel, this would be a direct path into one of Austria’s most compelling leisure destinations — a market that draws demand year-round across ski season, summer hiking, and various cultural events such as the International Porsche Days and the FAT Ice Race.

The owner is looking for an independent operator or boutique hotel group with the appetite and capability to take on a property of this character.

Asking lease: €15,000 net / monthly

Target room rates: between €300 - €700 contingent on room type and season.

Room mix:

• 1 Suite with 3 bedrooms (one whole floor)

• 1 Suite with 2 bedrooms

• 7 double rooms (differing in size due to the layout of the old house)

• 1 small extra hut with a double bed

To see photos and inquire, click here.

Advertise with The Stanza Classifieds: via classifieds@thestanzamedia.com.

Ever since I read ’s article about Le Lappe in the FT, I’ve been thinking of how I can find some time the fall to stay here. Le Lappe is just 11 bedrooms in Tuscany, and was recently renovated by Remy Renzullo, one of my favorite interior designers known for his work on the insanely beautiful Castle Howard.

Thanks for reading. For more of The Stanza, follow on Instagram here.

Six Senses is the brand that pioneered the category of wellness hospitality. You joined in 2012, and you scaled the brand from eight resorts to 27. What was your vision of wellness hospitality at the time, and what parts of that have or haven’t come true?

When New York private equity group Pegasus Capital bought the company in 2012 from the founders, it was particularly known for very good spas but wasn’t really doing any wellness. At the time, the company had probably 30 spas sitting in other people’s hotels, not their own. The hotel industry mostly had no idea about that stuff, so it was much easier to let someone else take the spa reins.

The brand is 30 years old now, so we owned it for half of its life. When we bought it, we had four specific goals. One was to take it out of being a resort brand on a beach in Southeast Asia — which is what it was, apart from one property in Oman. Two was to create a few very selective expressions of the brand in gateway cities. Three was to evolve the design ethos, which hadn’t moved much in the 15 years the brand had been alive. It was created with a focus on “barefoot luxury” back then — very Robinson Crusoe. It wasn’t particularly designed. A chair was four pieces of wood, a bag of nails, and a hammer. Back then that was the thing, it was cool. So, we felt strongly there needed to be some real design that respected the values of the company and the sustainability around materiality. We didn’t want to change that piece — we wanted to design it, to finish things off. The furniture needed to be a little more refined, without moving into polished marble and crystal chandeliers.

Lastly, we wanted to roll out a real wellness agenda, and to continue the conversation around sustainability in a very meaningful way. Those were the goals. The wellness piece, we believe, was a huge driver of the brand’s success over the last 15 years. Six Senses was the only brand with any scale that managed to do that. You said 27 — today it’s 29, with 20 more under development. Don’t get me wrong, there are some great independents that do it well. But we never wanted to be a destination spa. We never aspired to be a Lanserhof or a Canyon Ranch — that’s a completely different model. So, I’m proud of how we, and the big wellness team we had, were able to drive that agenda forward.

You said in a previous interview that you dislike the word luxury. Tell me more about that.

This is controversial. We had two words that were taboo: one was luxury, and one was exclusivity. We’d tell the team, whenever you’re naturally going to use that word, stop and think of something else. The word luxury carries a certain connotation — that it is not for everybody, that you’ve got to be in a certain socioeconomic group and be ready to spend $1,500 a night or more for a room, which is where the high-end industry sits today. We had such purity of intent with our wellness and sustainability platforms that I didn’t want marketing to say: this is just for us special people who have lots of money.

That said, that’s the market we played in. So, goodness, am I being hypocritical or not? But I said, let’s just not use the word. Let’s talk about quality, natural beauty, and the things that describe it, without that connotation.

It’s the “show, don’t tell.”

I think so. We were very understated as a brand, and very mindful about what we talked about publicly. I always used to get into trouble — the communications people would check with me before every interview: don’t say this, don’t say that. And I’d go, okay, okay. And then I’d say it. Because there are no secrets, really. And the integrity of the brand was very important to us.

Before Six Senses, you were at Four Seasons from 1994 to 2008. How did the hotel business evolve throughout all those market cycles, and what are the patterns you’re seeing unfold today?

What has happened over the years is that there’s much more storytelling now. We suffer from so many brands, so many hotels, and it’s harder to distinguish between the — I can say luxury now — the upper-luxury products out there, because they’re all pretty much the same, with the greatest respect to everybody. I think Four Seasons still has the best service culture of any company in the world. But at that level of the market, it’s got to be so much more than great service, great food, and a comfortable bed. If you don’t have those, you’re not even in the game.

The successful groups — and the startups that break through — are those with a very, very clear narrative. You can’t be everything to everybody, and that’s what most of these brands attempt to be.

Agreed.

And hence they end up a bit vanilla. Whereas brands with a distinct attitude and narrative will not appeal to everybody — and that’s fine. Six Senses did not appeal to everybody. People would go there and say, that’s a bit too rough for me, a bit too rustic. But there were enough people that loved it. The really successful brands have a very distinct story, well-articulated, because it’s such a crowded market. Unless you can differentiate in some way, you’re just going to be middle.

You’re always around people that are making a lot of big decisions in the hotel world — both operators and capital. Why do you think these people are so afraid to take risks and truly differentiate themselves?

Why? Because it’s kind of a vanilla world. On the capital side, VC investors will perhaps go into something unproven, but most capital sources in hospitality don’t have the stomach for that — particularly once you’re talking to sovereign funds or institutional money. There’s the odd exception, like our friends at Cain, who are very serious and very disciplined, but if something resonates, they’ll say, let’s give it a shot. And they’re a bit different because they’re happy to be in both the brand and the real estate — you don’t find many investment groups that also want a piece of brands.

You joined Starwood in 2008 to build the Baccarat and 1 Hotels brands. As Starwood is a different type of owner in the way they’re capitalized, what lessons did you learn about building hotels to return capital within a relatively short time frame?

I probably learned more at Starwood Capital in four or five years than I did in 14 years with Four Seasons — about PE and the transactional side of the business. That was in fact why I left Four Seasons. I was in Singapore running Four Seasons Asia Pacific, and everyone I knew was a banker. And I said, I want to be a banker — everyone I know is a banker. So, I ended up with Barry at an interesting time in the world. I showed up at the beginning of 2008, and a week after I arrived, Bear Stearns and Lehman went up, and everybody was going out of business.

I went there ostensibly to develop Baccarat and 1 Hotels, but because of what happened, I ended up moving to Paris with Concorde, a small luxury group he owned. He ended up with Baccarat purely by accident. He’d bought the assets of Taittinger, the champagne house, because they had 700 limited-service hotels — that was the platform he was after. But they also owned Baccarat crystal. So, he ends up with the crystal brand. What am I going to do with this? I don’t know — let’s create a hotel brand around it. So that’s what we did.

The private equity experience has you looking at completely different metrics. It was like doing a finance degree — most hotel guys don’t have that kind of background. It was interesting to me that before you make the investment, you plan the exit. I’m going, what’s that all about? We’re not going to invest in anything until we know how we’re going to get out of it? Interesting concept. And IRRs are always dependent on cap rates when you sell — all this stuff. It was a completely different vocabulary. Even as builders, when we financed hotels, we never really thought much about the way out — I was fundamentally an operator. So, I learned a lot, and I’m very, very grateful for Starwood Capital. That said, it’s not an environment I would have chosen to spend my life in.

Why?

I think hotel people are fundamentally caregivers. We spend our lives looking after people. PE guys don’t care about stuff like that.

They truly don’t care if you live or die.

There’s less team spirit, because they make their money on their deals. Don’t screw with my deal, you know? So, it can get toxic. And Barry has a huge reputation. There were a lot of young Harvard graduates at the firm who thought he was a rock star. And he is a rock star. Just look at what he has created over the years. The ability to raise huge capital and produce stellar results consistently.

We lasted four and a half, five years, and people said that’s a long time. He’s brilliant. He’s one of the rare people in his business with an equally developed right brain and left brain. He’s as comfortable in a design studio as he is funding the deal. In fact, the design part, the creative part, is his recreation.

He played a huge role in institutional capital flowing into boutique hotels. That was his thing.

For sure. But he’d already created Starwood Hotels — people don’t realize it started with Starwood Capital. Starwood Hotels was called Starwood Hotels because of Starwood Capital. And W was Barry and his wife Mimi, at their kitchen table in Greenwich. He didn’t include Starwood Hotels in that process — he was the first to say this brand is going to be run separately, I’m not going to put it into a big public company. So, it had its own team, its own creative team — everything was dedicated to W, much to the upset of the rest of Starwood.

It was the same with Six Senses for four or five years after we sold it — it was kept very separate from IHG. There was a CEO at the time that understood the dynamic: you buy these boutique companies because they’re fun and cool and entrepreneurial, and then most companies proceed to suck them into the system and wonder why they lose their soul. For the first five years, we had a CEO at IHG that totally got that — much to the upset of many within IHG, because they weren’t allowed to touch it. But that’s how it kept its identity.

Are there any similarities between the market at that time — 2008 — and today?

Read more

When I started The Stanza three years ago, I didn’t anticipate the number of hospitality nerds that I would connect with over the internet. The Stanza has grown to a cumulative audience of 285,000+ across platforms, and it has been the greatest privilege to share my perspective and passion for hospitality with you all.

A couple winters ago, I had a ski instructor tell me to pause on the way down a particularly challenging slope. “Look up behind you and see how far you’ve come.” It ended up being a useful metaphor for life. Over the course of the journey, when you’re so focused on what’s directly in front of you, it’s often helpful to zoom out for perspective. So on the third anniversary of The Stanza, I find myself pausing on the slope and looking back up the hypothetical mountain.

When I started posting on social media three years ago, the business of hospitality wasn’t yet a “trending topic”. And, throughout my entire employed career I had been bound by the restriction of working for SEC-registered advisors and thus never had a public social media profile. Therefore, posting videos of myself talking to the camera and writing a newsletter felt massively cringe! I remember feeling my stomach sinking whenever I heard that an old colleague was gossiping about me behind my back or when I would receive hateful comments. If I could tell anything to my former self in those moments, it would be this: “It’s cringe until you’re successful.”

Having the humility to be a beginner at thirty, and to risk failing in public as an entrepreneur, means climbing cringe mountain, that steep learning curve at the start of anything new. It was the only way to find out where my potential could take me. Three years in, I would not yet call myself “successful”; I am still somewhere on the mountain, and some days I still feel the cringe. But I can say with confidence that starting The Stanza, sharing my insights on hospitality, and learning to become a storyteller, was the best decision of my life.

Today, I feel immense gratitude to have connected with you all through a shared passion not just for hospitality, but also for all the wonderful aspects of life that hospitality touches: the art of taking care of others, immersing oneself in beauty, and an insatiable curiosity for new places and people.

Thank you for being part of The Stanza,

Nadine

Read previous issues of The Stanza here.

SEEKING BOUTIQUE HOTEL OPERATOR, ZELL AM SEE, AUSTRIA

Schloss Prielau is a historic castle hotel with 10 keys on the shores of Lake Zell in Austria’s Salzburg region — one of the few genuinely rare assets in the alpine luxury market that is available to operate right now.

The property is fully permitted and operational, with an adjacent restaurant, and is available under a lease arrangement. There is no construction timeline, no planning process, and no repositioning required from the ground up. If you’ve been wanting to operate a boutique hotel, this would be a direct path into one of Austria’s most compelling leisure destinations — a market that draws demand year-round across ski season, summer hiking, and various cultural events such as the International Porsche Days and the FAT Ice Race.

The owner is looking for an independent operator or boutique hotel group with the appetite and capability to take on a property of this character.

Asking lease: €15,000 net / monthly

Target room rates: between €300 - €700 contingent on room type and season.

Room mix:

• 1 Suite with 3 bedrooms (one whole floor)

• 1 Suite with 2 bedrooms

• 7 double rooms (differing in size due to the layout of the old house)

• 1 small extra hut with a double bed

To see photos and inquire, click here.

Advertise with The Stanza Classifieds: via classifieds@thestanzamedia.com.

I’m taking a short break from writing this week to think about the rest of 2026. If you’re new here or if you’d like to catch up on previous letters & interviews, here are some recent crowd favorites:

Podcasts

Gilda Perez-Alvarado: CEO of Orient Express and Group CSO of Accor

A look into reviving a heritage hospitality brand in partnership with LVMH and Accor, and what it means to build a multi-modal travel business today.

Anne-Laure Ollagnon: CEO of Airelles Group

If you know me in person, you’ll know that I absolutely love Airelles and their approach to hospitality. In Anne-Laure’s first ever podcast interview, we talked about how Airelles’ family office ownership allows them to create a true ultra-luxury guest experience.

Jonathan Goldstein: Founder & CEO of Cain

A very special and full circle moment for me, as a lot of the experience and insights from my time at Cain is the foundation for The Stanza’s voice. While Cain is known for their investment in Aman Group, Jonathan is an excellent storyteller and real estate entrepreneur. Anyone can learn from this episode.

Newsletters

The Business of “Eurosummer”: Is seasonal luxury hospitality a durable business?

The economics of seasonal beach restaurants, with input from Alexandre Rossoz at Loulou Restaurants and Marc Lotenberg of Dorsia.

Not everyone can nor should do luxury hospitality: Saying what everyone is thinking but won’t say out loud.

In the context of “K-shaped hospitality” what are the crucial inputs that go into creating a true ultra-luxury hotel?

The most underutilized tool in guest curation: “Who is this hotel for?”

The case for thoughtfully curating your guest mix.

The soft power behind the world’s most booked hotels: Capital ‘D’ distribution

Similarly, the case for selective distribution and long-term thinking.

“Doing hotels” vs “doing hospitality”: What’s the difference and why does it matter?

In the midst of “hotel mania”, what distinguishes the players who are in it for the right reasons?

Thanks for reading. For more of The Stanza, follow on Instagram here.

Thank you for your feedback on July’s podcast episode featuring Gilda Perez-Alvarado, CEO of the new darling on the hospitality scene, Orient Express. She’s also the Group Chief Strategy Officer of Accor, with a hotel real estate background, and therefore brings a unique perspective to the development of the Orient Express brand. If you’ve stayed at an OE property or have gone on the yacht or train, I’d be interested in hearing about your experience. Feel free to DM me on Instagram or direct reply to this email.

Today’s letter is written in collaboration with Dorsia, a long-time partner of The Stanza. While Dorsia is known as the app that gets you access to impossible tables and events, what’s interesting is the tech they’re building to support restaurants and members clubs. As Dorsia partners with several successful venues in key markets around the world, one could say that they have access to interesting data and insights worth nerding out over.

Enjoy,

Nadine

In today’s newsletter:

• What’s the key to running a profitable beach club business that has guests returning every summer? Alexandre Rossoz of Loulou Restaurants shares insights from the successful Loulou Ramatuelle

• What makes a resort market sticky? Marc Lotenberg of Dorsia discusses the common thread between resort markets that maintain durability

Read previous issues of The Stanza here.

SEEKING BOUTIQUE HOTEL OPERATOR, ZELL AM SEE, AUSTRIA

Schloss Prielau is a historic castle hotel with 10 keys on the shores of Lake Zell in Austria’s Salzburg region — one of the few genuinely rare assets in the alpine luxury market that is available to operate right now.

The property is fully permitted and operational, with an adjacent restaurant, and is available under a lease arrangement. There is no construction timeline, no planning process, and no repositioning required from the ground up. If you’ve been wanting to operate a boutique hotel, this would be a direct path into one of Austria’s most compelling leisure destinations — a market that draws demand year-round across ski season, summer hiking, and various cultural events such as the International Porsche Days and the FAT Ice Race.

The owner is looking for an independent operator or boutique hotel group with the appetite and capability to take on a property of this character.

Asking lease: €15,000 net / monthly

Target room rates: between €300 - €700 contingent on room type and season.

Room mix:

• 1 Suite with 3 bedrooms (one whole floor)

• 1 Suite with 2 bedrooms

• 7 double rooms (differing in size due to the layout of the old house)

• 1 small extra hut with a double bed

To see photos and inquire, click here.

Advertise with The Stanza Classifieds: via classifieds@thestanzamedia.com.

For today’s letter, I spoke to Marc Lotenberg, founder of Dorsia, and Alexandre Rossoz, Group Managing Director of Loulou Restaurants. (And yes, you can book Loulou Ramatuelle on Dorsia — use code THESTANZA to access.)

I hope you enjoy this letter somewhere at the beach.

The Business of “Eurosummer”

One of the best perks of going to university in London as an American was experiencing pre-Brexit “Eurosummer”. It wasn’t even called that back then, but essentially it was the same act of cycling through the usual Mediterranean resort destinations, and basking in long rosé-fueled lunches by the sea accompanied with incredible people watching (always bring opaque sunglasses so no one catches you staring). Back then, social media and “content” weren’t the modus operandi and therefore the “Eurosummer” tradition was much less of a status symbol than it is today. It was simply just the feeling of freedom and relief after exams were over. Now, in a post-pandemic world where revenge travel has yet to slow down, the beach restaurants that anchor the “Eurosummer” tradition have become cultural institutions seemingly taken over by (mostly) Americans who refuse to skip a Mediterranean summer at all costs.

As an adult with a fully developed pre-frontal cortex, every time I’m at one of these places, I find myself doing the mental math to figure out how much they’re making per day. I always come to the same conclusion, that these hotspots must be making quite a bit, even if people are generally drinking less these days. I’ve also concluded that the reason why “Eurosummer” continues to gain popularity as an annual tradition is the feeling of leisure people get from it: who doesn’t love long lunches by the glittering turquoise sea with friends and family?

“Eurosummer” is now practically half the year

Most people misread the demand side of seasonal luxury and assume that a summer market is a race to fill a three-month window. What Marc sees in the data says otherwise: “The durable markets are the ones outgrowing their season,” he told me, and the case study he reaches for is Ibiza. It used to trade June through August, then May to September, and now April to October, with a resident cohort staying year-round. With the rise of flexible lifestyles post pandemic, several leisure markets that were once operating during a short window have dissolved the notion of a fixed season.

Cultural tentpoles do a lot of the work of stretching the calendar and locking in repeat demand. Monaco has the Grand Prix and the Yacht Show. Cannes has the film festival, AmfAR, and Lions. Dorsia’s members plan around that calendar, and the same names come back for the same moments year after year. Seasonality, then, isn’t the fixed constraint it’s taken to be. In the strongest markets it’s a variable that the best operators and the smartest municipalities are actively lengthening.

It may seem counterintuitive that in the “Eurosummer” game, longevity is earned through restraint

Marc’s account of why some markets keep their guests and others lose them has nothing to do with product and everything to do with restraint. “Long-term success comes from consistency, not gouging,” he said. He watched Mykonos and Saint-Tropez both go through the same cycle years ago, prices creeping up as the markets got busier, guests starting to feel taken for granted, and a slice of them simply leaving for somewhere that hadn’t yet learned to overcharge. Both markets, in his telling, “sobered up.” Ibiza, he thinks, is on the edge of that same test now.

Alexandre runs the site-level version of exactly this discipline. Loulou has spent two years resisting price inflation on Pampelonne, where most operators charge what the market will bear. There is no minimum spend. "Forcing spend is the fastest way to kill the energy and atmosphere we're actually chasing," he said. While a growing share of the beach leans into pure spectacle, Loulou stayed what he calls restaurateurs first. His line for it is one I keep coming back to: "The party should happen because people had a great meal, not instead of one." That shows up in who fills the tables. The first seating is casual and busy and includes families, and the second eases into something more festive as lunch winds down. The payoff isn't sentimental — refusing the squeeze is what has given Loulou a rock-solid first seating and strong shoulder-season months, the exact stretches where less patient operators are already half-empty.

The venues that compound are the ones that decline to charge everything they could. Restraint isn’t a brand value here. It’s the reason that a market or an operator is built to last more than a handful of summers.

What makes a beach restaurant profitable within weeks?

Ask a generalist why they’d steer clear of a seasonal restaurant and they’ll say the short season, the weather, or the risk of a business that only breathes for a quarter of the year. However, the unit economics don’t always corroborate that concern. “A seasonal site and a year-round Paris restaurant actually land at roughly the same EBITDA margin,” Alexandre told me, and Loulou’s seasonal margin is sometimes slightly higher. That surprises people, but it shouldn’t once you see how the cost base is built.

Two things make it work. The first is that Loulou has a nearly zero fixed cost base prior to opening such that all costs are variable. Suppliers in Ramatuelle and Monaco are themselves seasonal, so the costs that would sit on a year-round P&L simply don’t exist out of season. What Loulou carries through the winter is minimal, some storage and some maintenance, which is why, in Alexandre’s words, Loulou Ramatuelle “becomes profitable within the first few weeks of opening.” The second is the real estate. A Pampelonne beachfront site isn’t bought or leased in the way a Paris address is. Loulou operates it as a concession granted by the Ramatuelle townhall, which means the business isn’t carrying a large acquisition or lease outflow against a seasonal trading window. The capital at risk going into a season is a fraction of what the same revenue would demand from a permanent site, and that is a large part of why the returns hold up.

Loulou Ramatuelle is lunch-only and turns roughly 550 covers in the restaurant on a strong day, plus another 100 on the beach sunbeds, with about 85 people working across the floor, kitchen, shop, valet, and boat on any given day. Additionally, one of the bigger line items, unsurprisingly, is maintenance capex on the building as its proximity to the sea causes saltwater corrosion.

Alexandre quotes James Sherwood, who built what became Belmond, on the wisdom of betting on sunny destinations where weather isn’t a variable. The South of France delivers a low and consistent count of rainy days, so over a short season it barely moves the needle. Courchevel, he notes, is a different story. But for the Mediterranean sites, weather is not the thing that keeps him up at night.

Staffing is a challenge for every hospitality operator, but seasonality adds a layer of complexity

What keeps him up is staff. “The season starts fast and there’s no real warm-up period,” Alexandre said. The team has to be at full standard within a couple of weeks, with no gentle ramp to get service right, which is why Loulou has spent years investing in staff loyalty. A large share of the team returns season after season, guests recognize the faces, and the group can open and close a seasonal restaurant in a matter of days because the choreography lives in people who’ve done it before. Staff accommodation goes into the model as a cost and a piece of operational complexity that a Paris restaurant never has to price.

Marc, coming at it from the market level, points at the identical line item. When he lists what actually makes a location durable, past the transportation accessibility, the anchor venues and the good hospitality, he lands on one of the most critical aspects for any seasonal business: housing for staff. “If staff can’t afford to live there, the cost of labor goes up, then prices go up, and customers feel abused.” The housing you provide for your people and the value your guests feel they’re getting are therefore the same problem to solve.

Mediterranean beach restaurants are compelling and durable businesses…if they resist the temptation to sell out

So the answer to the question the season poses, whether this is a solid business or a bet on short-term demand, is that it is durable, but the durability is a discipline rather than a location. The markets that last are the ones extending the three-month window. The operators that last are the ones who refuse to charge the absolute most people are willing to pay while delivering less value. And the thing that decides both, sitting under the margin and the guest experience alike, is whether you can properly incentivize the people who make everything work.

What compounds, in the end, is a mindset more than a market. Alexandre keeps returning to the word institution: places that, as he puts it, “feel like they’ve always been there, that can pass the test of time.” That’s the opposite of the reflex he sees spreading, operators leaning into artifice, “decor built for photos, music played too loud, lighting dimmed to hide rather than flatter,” and treating one good restaurant as a reason to expand. His position is that a great restaurant, however successful, isn’t automatically a brand, and that some of the best places are special because they’re local and were never meant to travel at all. The operators who last stay focused on the essence of good hospitality: how you welcome a guest and how well you serve them. In a market that sells a hot new opening every May, the most durable position in “Eurosummer” is held by the people building for decades rather than for the season in front of them.

Thanks for reading. For more of The Stanza, follow on Instagram here.

July’s podcast episode is a very timely one for both the hospitality industry and travel enthusiasts. Orient Express has emerged in crescendo form — from the launch of its train, La Dolce Vita and its first hotel, La Minerva Rome, both in 2025, to the seemingly ubiquitous Orient Express Venezia and the impossible-to-ignore launch of The Corinthian yacht just a couple months ago. The revamped heritage brand has just begun trading, and yet well-heeled and savvy travelers already recognize the brand’s art deco codes and storytelling on multi-modal travel.

Last summer, I was introduced to Orient Express CEO Gilda Perez-Alvarado through one of my old bosses at Cain (shout out to Ellen!) and wanted to know how Accor, in partnership with LVMH, is planning to create a new niche within luxury travel. While we are seeing other brands building their own multi-modal travel universes, Orient Express is distinct in that it’s a trademark being repositioned and it’s establishing all three modes - hotels, yachts, trains - contemporaneously and through various partnership structures. The hotels and trains are structured as management agreements as per Accor’s asset-light model, while the yacht cruise business is capitalized in partnership with Swiss investor Millenium.

My conversation with Gilda is a rare look at a heritage brand being rebuilt as an operating business in real time, from the person running it.

I hope you enjoy the episode and as always, feel free to write to me with your thoughts.

Best

Nadine

Watch on Spotify or Youtube

Listen on Apple Podcasts

Part I: The Operating System for Culture with Marc Lotenberg, founder of Dorsia

Dorsia is building the operating system for private members’ clubs: a first-party, end-to-end technology platform designed to replace the legacy software and disconnected third-party integrations that most clubs still run on today. Marc Lotenberg, founder of Dorsia, argues that the gap between what the most discerning members expect and what the average club can actually deliver comes down to a failure of infrastructure, not hospitality intent.

In Part I of this episode, Marc makes the case for why genuine personalization at the club level has to be built on first-party data sovereignty, what it actually costs to build compliant, frictionless hospitality technology at scale, and why he believes that pretending every prospective member is your customer is the fastest way to end up with none.

Thank you Dorsia for making this episode possible.

To learn more about Dorsia’s hospitality tech, get in touch: knox@dorsia.com

Download Dorsia to get access to impossible tables and events here (code: THESTANZA)

Follow Dorsia on Instagram here

Part II: Heritage at Scale: Building the Orient Express Universe Across Trains, Yachts, and Hotels with Gilda Perez-Alvarado, CEO Orient Express

Episode starts at 13:26

Gilda Perez-Alvarado is CEO of Orient Express and Chief Strategy Officer at Accor, where she oversees the brand’s expansion across hotels, luxury trains, and yachts. Orient Express operates as a strategic joint venture between Accor and LVMH, combining Accor’s decades of global hospitality infrastructure with LVMH’s expertise in luxury consumer goods and brand stewardship. Gilda joined Accor in late 2023 after two decades at JLL Hotels & Hospitality Group, where she rose to Global CEO of the practice, advising owners and investors on hospitality transactions across real estate and capital markets worldwide.

Today, Orient Express spans two open hotels in Rome and Venice, the La Dolce Vita luxury train operating on Italy’s historic tourist rail network, a second train, L’Orient Express set for 2027, and the Corinthian yacht that launched in May 2026, with the Olympian to follow in 2027. Every asset is designed to be privatizable, capped in room count to protect scarcity, and sourced through a combination of third-party owner relationships and direct joint venture capital. The Italian portfolio is developed in partnership with Arsenale, who first approached Accor ahead of the pandemic with a proposal to flag the La Dolce Vita train as Orient Express.

Orient Express is ultimately building what Gilda describes as a multi-modal travel business, designing itineraries that sequence hotels, trains, and yachts into a single continuous guest journey rather than a collection of standalone bookings.

In this episode, Nadine sits down with Gilda to explore what it really takes to relaunch one of the world’s most recognized travel brands spanning real estate, rail, and maritime operations, while satisfying the competing demands of two publicly-oriented parent companies and a long-term brand mandate that has to hold for at least another century.

INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS

• How the Accor-LVMH joint venture divides responsibility, and what each parent company brings to the table beyond equity

• The investment logic of the Arsenale partnership, and how its approach to luxury train inventory shaped the Italian portfolio’s hotel and rail strategy

• The site selection framework Orient Express applies to new hotel assets, including the role of an in-house historian

• Why Orient Express capped its hotel room counts and built every asset to be privatizable, and how that constraint shapes owner conversations and pricing strategy

• Gilda’s view on how distribution and guest acquisition has evolved beyond traditional means

• The open question on the Corinthian yacht’s revenue model: whether Orient Express becomes primarily a transient product or a private charter business, and what the early demand signals suggest

• How Orient Express is approaching guest curation on trains and yachts, and why Gilda frames it as one of the most consequential and least controllable variables in the business

• The tension between short-term shareholder reporting obligations as part of a publicly traded parent and a brand mandate framed explicitly around a 143-year time horizon

• What Gilda learned from LVMH’s approach to scarcity and brand stewardship, and how she is applying that framework to a hospitality product that did not previously operate at this price point

Learn more about Orient Express here

Follow Orient Express on Instagram

Last week I was curious to know if you would buy a branded residence. 67% of you who responded to the poll voted no, which leaves a third who would buy one.

I’ve discussed branded residences on The Stanza over the years and surprisingly found that the general audience sentiment behind them was lukewarm, especially when compared to that of hotels or members clubs. But, the idea behind branded resi makes practical sense - both from the developer’s and the buyer’s perspective. For developers (particularly in the US), condo sales in theory fund the construction of the hotel, while for buyers who spend less than 183 days in the calendar year in certain jurisdictions would appreciate the convenience of the “lock and leave” lifestyle. That being said, the bigger question mark for me is: what is the intellectually honest way to size the

demand to pay a brand premium above comparable condos, likely with similar quality finishes? Some will point to the increasing wealth accumulation in the US alongside more wealthy people choosing to live an untethered lifestyle. But those are macro tailwinds that don’t necessarily translate cleanly to branded resi demand.

In reality, even if you rent out your residence while you’re gone, you’re still paying a management fee to the brand for that service. To me, this is the only real marginal benefit and convenience factor. I’d also posit that very few brands even merit a use case for branded resi - Aman and Four Seasons being the only two I’d personally consider as a buyer prioritizing hard product and service quality.

If you’re new here, or want to catch up on the best of The Stanza, I’d recommend that you start here.

In today’s newsletter:

• A ship at year ten has no land under it, no comp set, and no obvious buyer, so what’s the liquidity play?

• Why does the smallest ship in the category cost the most per bed to build?

• If ships are not technically finite assets, what actually protects this category from competition?

Read previous issues of The Stanza here.

For all live listings & inquiries (hotels for sale, investment opportunities, open job roles), click here.

Advertise with The Stanza Classifieds: via classifieds@thestanzamedia.com.

Three weeks ago, I wrote about the emerging category of yacht cruises — where the guest demand comes from and what’s the long term value creation opportunity for investors. The most common follow-up questions centered around what it takes to actually build these ships and how to contextualize the business. The instincts that serve a hotel investor, such as per key build costs or exit comps, either don't transfer to a ship or transfer in ways that mislead. For example, a vessel that costs more per key than any hotel ever traded can still be rationally built. This week’s letter serves as a primer: what a ship costs to build and why, which of your land instincts to keep and which to retire, and what the people writing these checks are actually underwriting.

“Per-key” doesn’t translate from hotels to ships

Orient Express spent roughly €500M building The Corinthian, a ship with 54 suites. That’s over €9M per key, several multiples of what some of the most expensive hotel transactions on record have traded at.

Read more

Happy Friday.

Eurosummer is in full swing. This year, I’m looking forwards to returning to my tried and true classic: lunch at Jondal Ibiza for their unreal king crab legs and tomato salad, followed by a relaxing afternoon on one of their sun loungers (but more importantly, for the people watching)! I’m also excited to try the new Jais Ibiza, which just opened this season after hit restaurants in Ramatuelle and Paris. You can book Jondal and Jais on Dorsia (and many more fantastic spots in the Med) and avoid the burden of asking friends & acquaintances for reservation favors. Download the app here and use THESTANZA for access.

Branded residences have been trending for a long time, and I’m curious what would-be buyers actually think of them. If you wouldn’t mind…

If you would buy one of these residences, is there a specific brand you’re most interested in? I welcome to hear your thoughts on branded residences - just direct reply to this email.

If you’re new here, or want to catch up on the best of The Stanza, I’d recommend that you start here.

In today’s newsletter:

• Everyone’s crowding the same trade in luxury hospitality. What’s the catch they’re all skipping?

• Where is the next big market opportunity for hotels? (It’s more obvious than you think.)

• How will debt & equity investors respond to an increasingly competitive market for compelling hospitality real estate?

Read previous issues of The Stanza here.

Current listings:

• For Weekly Rent: Villa Bagatelle, St. Tropez (From €176,000 per week including staff)

• For sale: Fully-entitled hospitality site in West Hollywood $6M

For all live listings & inquiries (hotels for sale, investment opportunities, open job roles), click here.

Advertise with The Stanza Classifieds: via classifieds@thestanzamedia.com.

Hospitality capital markets: mid-year temperature check

As 2026 unfolds and the worlds of hospitality and travel continue on their bull run, I’ve been reflecting on what got us here and what will happen in the next cycle, particularly as I field the same question from several people recently: what’s your read on hospitality right now? The question is usually prefaced by a reference to “hotel opening mania”, which we are currently in the thick of. I remind them that hotels don’t just sprout out of nowhere — the projects we are seeing now are a result of years of planning and building, and more importantly, cheaper / easier debt coming out of the pandemic. As the hotel capital markets tend to disperse the tea leaves long before the story comes to fruition, now would be a good time to pause and delineate the key market trends.

Read more

Today’s letter is very long, but packed with stories and insights that I hope you find valuable and interesting. If this message is truncated on your inbox, you may read it on the Substack app or web browser.

Enjoy,

N

When Alex Ohebshalom’s father bought 250 Fifth Avenue in 1978, New York was a city most investors were leaving. The building sat as commercial space for the better part of four decades before Alex became, in his own words, obsessed with the idea that it could be something more than a real estate play. The Fifth Avenue Hotel opened at the end of 2023 as a fully independent luxury property, and within two years it had collected two Michelin Keys, and places on North America’s 50 Best for both Café Carmellini and The Portrait Bar.

What follows is the part of the story that doesn’t usually make it into the design features and awards: the brands that came knocking before he chose independence, a capital structure his family carried with cash equity to topping out, and the decision to hold a four-figure rate at barely half occupancy for eighteen months on the conviction that the flywheel would eventually turn.

I. The Redevelopment

What’s the story behind your father acquiring the building, and what was happening at the time when you decided to convert it into a hotel?

My father, Fred Ohebshalom, deserves all the credit. He had an exceptional level of foresight, and really just instinct. Picture New York in the 1970s. The city was on the brink of bankruptcy and it was a difficult place to live at the time. For whatever reason that I still don’t fully comprehend, he saw something else. He and his brothers were immigrants who came from Iran in the late 1960s, a real rags to riches story. They took the trade they knew, importing oriental rugs, built an exceptional business out of it, and reinvested those profits into distressed but extremely well-positioned trophy Fifth Avenue real estate that was very, very cheap at the time.

In 1978 he gets a call from his banker, who asked him to come to the bank on Fifth Avenue at 28th Street and tells him the building is being auctioned by silent bid. He says: “Great, I’m buying Fifth Avenue real estate. Let’s bid.” They put in a bid for $1 million and won, and found out after the fact that they’d overbid by something like $250,000 to $360,000. He still says it often: I’m buying and building for my grandkids and my great-grandkids, this is generational real estate, I’ll buy at low cap rates and hold for the long term.

The conversion came much later, as NoMad began to turn. We saw the Ace Hotel, the NoMad Hotel, all these new buildings going up in a beautiful, architecturally landmarked area, and we had air rights behind the mansion. Once we uncovered all the historical attributes of the property, it became clear that the best and highest use for this asset was a hotel. It deserved a more public, emotional, experiential use than a conventional office play. I became obsessed with the possibility that it could be something more than a real estate play, that it could be a cultural and emotional vessel for a business, which is what a hotel ultimately is.

When you looked at the floor plates of a landmarked building, where you can’t simply repartition walls, did you see something that worked as a hotel, or was it purely the architecture? And what did the landmark constraint end up costing you?

Many of the architectural elements made the case. The floor heights were dramatic. You had nearly thirty-foot ceilings in the original mansion hall coming off Fifth Avenue, which lent itself to the theatrical food and beverage space that’s now Café Carmellini. The Juliet balconies carried romance and drama, and we repurposed them, through a very expensive refabrication, into a multi-level space. I don’t think I’d have had the same response to a cookie-cutter ground-up building that ended up with nine-foot-two ceilings.

We had to take out a great deal of steelwork to make room for mechanical space, because we were capped on square footage and couldn’t go any higher. So we excavated two levels below grade to create back-of-house space, which gave us a 3,500-square-foot production kitchen, fitness facilities, and meeting rooms. And behind any wall, you’re opening up a whole world of madness. A hundred-plus years of everything is back there, old mechanicals, electrical, plumbing, layers and layers of paint over a facade that had deteriorated badly over time. The facade restoration of the mansion alone was roughly a $40 to $50 million project. We fabricated an entirely new cornice, 150 feet of original terracotta, and there were only two true terracotta producers in the United States at the time, one in California and one in Boston, which affected the pricing significantly. Landmarks governed everything down to paint and grout colors, particularly for the new tower and how its materials would complement the mansion facade.

There’s an argument that ground-up development in New York is more accessible and more marketable than working with a landmark. The case for the landmark is storytelling, which is central to hospitality. Yet on an STR report a landmark doesn’t show up as differentiated. A lender or equity investor looks at the comp set and resists the premium you believe the building deserves. You take the landmark because it’s a different product.

I’m a big believer in the power of constraints and how they force you to make tough decisions. You work with what you have, and those constraints become your soul in a way. They prevent the hotel from looking generic, which is huge.

The bones of the building informed the design. The fourteen-foot ceilings in the mansion let Martin Brudnizki play with the arch, that architectural element in the center of the mansion guest suite that won us the awards and put us on the map editorially. We never could have played with something like that without those landmark ceilings. The original mansion hall that became Café Carmellini, with its Juliet balconies, enabled all the drama of the space. Ultimately it’s about storytelling. It’s special to stay or dine in a Gilded Age mansion on Fifth Avenue. Not many people can make that claim. We wanted that to feel special and original, never contrived or cookie-cutter, and that’s where we layered in the entire narrative around the Flâneur, with a dare-to-be-great team that each put their own signature on the design, the programming, the story, and the service.

Can you share the capital stack behind the redevelopment, and how you thought about seeding the enterprise itself, separate from the real estate?

The capital stack is quite simple. My family funded the entire mansion redevelopment and the tower construction up to topping out of the superstructure, which we reached in August 2019, with our own family cash equity. Only then did we bring on more traditional construction financing, starting with a very modest senior piece. As the delays and budget overruns came, we took on a modest mezzanine loan to finish the project, and the family continued to fund as needed.

I’d add that hotels aren’t passive real estate. They’re operating businesses attached to complicated capital stacks. One of the biggest learnings from this whole experience is that the capital structure has to be designed for volatility, because any development cycle will almost always be longer and more expensive than any model can suggest. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred it doesn’t play out according to the paper. You need real holding power and staying power, and the family was geared for that.

II. Operating Independently

You’ve described the redevelopment as a decade-long journey that straddled the pandemic. What are the lessons you’d carry into the next hotel?

Conviction is very cheap at the beginning of a development and becomes much more expensive in the middle. The pandemic tested everything: my mental fortitude, the financing, construction, supply chain, labor, demand assumptions. It put me through the wringer.

There’s an old saying I love, that a founder has to be near delusional to see the vision through. I think it’s true. You can stare at a big plot of dirt for years, and that’s what I did. It almost brings me to tears to remember it. Long nights standing in a decrepit mansion, looking at a demolished plot of land, with so many things out of my control. You need the conviction, the endurance, the foresight, the resilience, and the somewhat delusional belief that the thing will get built.

The silver lining is that, in hindsight, the delays worked in our favor. They forced us to take more time to think, edit, refine, and obsess over the details, and to finesse the story so everything felt more layered. We trained for a full year. I had the whole team on board, starting with Olivier (Lordonnois, of Hotel de Crillon and Ritz Paris) and everyone below him. We built an entire offsite training facility with model rooms finished to the last centimeter, and we trained every day, morning to night, to build the service model. We wanted to be one of one. That gave us a real head start when we opened.

There are many stories inside that decade. A lot of people don’t know this, but before we decided to go fully independent, we were approached by all the major brands. We got very close with one initially. It was supposed to be a soft-branded property, a Thompson Hotel, much like what The Beekman is downtown today. Various groups came in with key money and wanted to do different one-offs. Then we hit a couple of delays, things fell out, and it gave me the space to look in the mirror and ask whether I had a strong enough brand value proposition to make a compelling case for a true iconic independent.

That’s where I had the audacity to go to my team with the idea behind Flâneur Hospitality, the story I wanted to tell, the philosophy I wanted to share with the luxury consumer. Everyone received it with open arms. We believed in the idea of patient, present, attention to detail. Then I had to go to Martin (Brudnizki) and tell him we were throwing all the design out the window and starting from scratch. That set the timeline back and added enormously to the budget. We probably lost another one to two years on a redesign around Flâneur, and it coincided with the financial pressures of COVID and rising interest rates. Then we brought in our food and beverage partner and had to redesign all the kitchens and mechanicals to support their venues. Everything went from four-star execution to five-star, and to whatever five-and-a-half-star means today.

For an owner weighing the same decision, how do you frame the choice between taking a flag and going independent?

It comes down to risk tolerance. Safety and comfort against capturing all the upside. Capped rates against uncapped potential. The certainty of automatic distribution on day one against building your own flywheel of distribution and awareness, which you have to invest in. It takes discipline, mental fortitude, and a lot of guts. You have to be hell-bent on your ability to execute, to time the market, to build a one-of-one product, and to outlast the headwinds that will inevitably appear. It’s not for the faint of heart. It’s an entrepreneurial effort through and through.

What’s the true cost of launching a management company alongside your first hotel?

The broad strokes come back to lean methods. Do as much as you can with as little as possible. My initial objective was to hire the best leadership at the executive level, top generalists with enough experience, pedigree, and expertise to be dangerous across every discipline of hospitality. That starts with an exceptional general manager and managing director and trickles down into sales, marketing, revenue management, the design team, and the brand team, which is all in-house.

The majority of the initial expense was branding and marketing: creating the visual identity, all the touchpoints, the collateral, the training, and all the small things people observe in the property and away from it, physically and digitally, that build awareness of the brand. We also outsourced strategically wherever it made sense, which gave us a real advantage. The big ones are design, with Martin Brudnizki, and food and beverage, with NoHo Hospitality and Andrew Carmellini. We outsourced some functions like revenue management, at least partially.

Over time we’ve brought a lot of it back in-house. External agencies once handled our graphics, our website, and our backend digital marketing, and we’ve since built that capability internally. I now have a new director of marketing and full control over our social and digital presence. I want to control more and more of the brand touchpoints.

Café Carmellini and The Portrait Bar landed on North America’s 50 Best lists. Both are remarkable for a hotel, where food and beverage is notoriously difficult to execute well, especially in a city like New York where you get to be part of the fabric, with public spaces inside a private building. What’s your approach to urban placemaking within hotel food and beverage?

It starts with the conviction that hotel food and beverage outlets can’t be a hotel amenity. They have to stand on their own, designed and programmed and branded and operated and acknowledged across the market as one-of-one, best-in-class venues that happen to coexist within a one-of-one luxury hotel. That’s the philosophy behind each of these spaces.

I say this with humility, but I’m proud of it. Last year I believe we were the only hotel in the world to be awarded 50 Best recognition for the hotel, the restaurant, and the bar. That speaks to the willingness to go further, to refuse to build just another lobby bar. We could have done the model where the bar is a reliable revenue maker but you wonder about its longevity. I’m a believer that the standards have to be set very high. These venues are the emotional engines of the hotel. They’re the melting pot, the center of gravity, where the personality of the brand gets expressed. It was very important to me that both Café Carmellini and The Portrait Bar be recognized globally in that light.

Do you believe these awards drive revenue?

Michelin and 50 Best are becoming more of the moment and more widely regarded, and at the independent level they’re non-negotiable. They drive credibility, conversation, and pricing confidence. They matter enormously to the travel advisor community, to PR, and to the team, who get that much more excited having something to work toward. They don’t replace operational excellence, but they drive morale, and that can’t be overlooked.

I see people with no real interest in hotels talking conversationally about Michelin Keys, which is suddenly a thing. Anecdotally, when people ask me for travel advice, they reference the 50 Best list. I’ll stand outside Café Carmellini and watch passersby admire the facade and the landscaping, then notice the 50 Best plaque on the wall, look at each other, and decide to go in. That’s organic marketing at its core, and I’ll play into it for as long as it’s relevant and be a steward of those institutions. Awards don’t create demand out of thin air, but they reduce doubt in the luxury market. They help a guest feel safer choosing something independent rather than defaulting to a big brand and their loyalty points.

Independent hotels live and die by distribution in a way flagged properties don’t. Walk me through how a guest books a room at The Fifth Avenue Hotel, and what has worked to drive that demand directly?

We push the funnel and the sales channels as hard as we can toward direct bookings, because direct to the website is the highest-quality point of sale we can ask for. The OTAs have a role, particularly in discovery, but they can’t be the backbone of a true luxury hotel. At the luxury level the healthiest demand is direct, repeat, consortia, travel advisor, corporate, and group, and for longevity I want it to be organic. Marketing follows brand, so I put a great deal into brand awareness.

From the genesis of the project we had a relentless PR strategy, bringing the best editors and tastemakers, people like you, through the property pre-opening to stay, eat, and tell the story. We hosted the Oscar de la Renta New York Fashion Week show in the ballroom and in Café Carmellini right before we opened, and it led to a full-page Vogue feature dedicated to the hotel. We opened with Sarah Jessica Parker at the Juliet balcony pouring champagne over a cascade of glasses, which led to more full-page features in major publications. That was the beginning of the flywheel. We were inducted into Leading Hotels of the World before opening, which gave us early exposure into the Leaders Club, and Amex Fine Hotels and Resorts, which not everyone is accepted into, opens the funnel further. We built a best-in-class in-house marketing team and strategically built a base of corporate and group business without diminishing the brand or the rate positioning.

Ultimately the product has to speak for itself. We under-promise and over-deliver, with a full team of onsite butlers, an exceptional gifting program, and personalized, anticipatory, invisible service. I’ll be honest that it didn’t start with a huge ramp. It took a good year and a half to build to this level of distribution. We operated at mid-fifties to low-sixties occupancy for the first year and a half, and we’re now ramping into the high seventies and low eighties. That was a deliberate strategy. We held the rate and trusted that the flywheel would eventually take us to stabilized occupancy.

How did you think about pricing a new hotel and a new brand, and how has your view of rate changed as the accolades have accumulated?

This was a very tough one that we debated for months before opening. The conventional wisdom at the independent level is that you set the rate and hold it as long as you possibly can until you have proof of concept, and that momentum will eventually build. That requires real holding power, patience, and deep conviction that you can execute and quickly gain guest confidence and travel advisor trust. Everything has to go better than planned, from PR and marketing to the macro environment.

It was painful, but the minute you give relief on the rate, it’s extremely difficult to claw your way back up. So we preempted the reality that we’d have to hold a $1,000-plus rate for a year to eighteen months at low occupancy, with a high degree of confidence that it would ramp and stabilize.

III. The Flâneur Philosophy

You’ve been open for about two and a half years. How has the philosophy behind Flâneur evolved?

Flâneur is about magical luxury, about curiosity and cultural authorship. It’s built on the belief that the best hotels aren’t standardized products. They’re emotional and cultural vessels that help you see a city differently and remind you of your own uniqueness. We’re not trying to make every property look the same. We’re building an iconic collection with a recognizable intelligence, a shared standard of taste, generosity, and emotional detail. It’s a feeling and a felt brand.

The hard part is translating emotion into the physical world and keeping it relevant without ever feeling stiff, theatrical, or scripted. That’s why I hire for the highest levels of emotional intelligence. I don’t want anyone operating from a script. I want them present, listening intently, asking what the guest needs and how to deliver it before the guest even knows they need it, so the next time they think about New York they want to come back.

Martin Brudnizki has a distinct, maximalist style that some find polarizing. Were there moments when you had to pull him back, and moments when he pushed you somewhere you were unsure of that turned out to be right?

I love this question, and I love talking about Martin, because he’s such a partner. He’s the master of the grand modern fantasy. He’s of the moment and yet a classic, and his designs will hopefully live forever.

He’s as audacious and courageous as they come, with a clear and pointed point of view that could be read as polarizing. That’s exactly what we wanted. I wanted to take a hard line and come out with something ambitious and exciting that not everybody would love at first look, but that the right tastemakers would fall in love with, and they did. From there it spread organically and became more widely embraced over time. That tension was absolutely critical.

The real magic is in the tension between fantasy and function. I had a big vision for what the hotel should be, and the challenge was making it functional, practical, accessible, manageable, and cost-effective. Martin understood that the building could carry romance, color, pattern, and theatrics, and I challenged him to lean more deeply into the Flâneur narrative, that collection of beautiful objects, antiquities, furniture, and artwork from all over the world. It still feels like a Martin project, but a little more unique than the typical one. In the guest rooms everything is perfectly positioned, low-touch and high-tech, with outlets in all the right places, DigiValet, and Lutron systems controlling the lighting and shades. It was designed smartly, but with the grandiosity and romanticism that Martin brings.

You once said in an interview that the problem you wanted to solve was walking into a lobby and seeing everyone on their phones. What did you design or program into the hotel to make the lobby a place people inhabit rather than pass through?

I was quoted on that before we opened, and it was taken a little out of context. The writer at the time almost suggested we were building dead zones where phones wouldn’t work, which was far too literal. The real point is to create rooms, rituals, and moments that make the phone feel less interesting. There’s so much more to be felt, seen, and discovered in the human experience than in the digital one.

As much as I’m a proponent of AI, and we use these technologies across all my businesses to reduce friction and cost, I’m fundamentally all in on the human experience, and I believe we have an obligation to bring people back into it. The only way to pull someone off their phone is to give them something better to look at, taste, overhear, discover, or feel. So we curated the artwork to provoke curiosity and closer inspection. The Portrait Bar has a handpicked collection of literature and portraiture. You enter into a grand, intimate, romantic lobby, and the first thing you see is an extraordinary tapestry that provokes the question of what it is and where it came from. Only by asking do you learn it’s a hand-created work that took three years, made by a renowned museum artist, and at every corner of that twelve-foot piece you notice something different.

Then there are the rituals. Someone knocks on your door at 5:05 on a Tuesday with the most beautiful assortment of accoutrements for a martini ceremony. We’ve expanded that into book culture, matcha culture, and wine culture, with a 17,000-bottle collection in the cellar. How do you invite people into that and teach them something they didn’t know they loved? How do you bring them into the kitchen to explore? There’s so much in this vessel that should take you off your phone and create a deeper sense of connection, with the city and with yourself.

I want to close on the greats of New York. You’ve spoken about wanting The Fifth Avenue Hotel to earn its place among institutions that have decades of mythology behind them. What does it take for a new hotel to earn that kind of cultural weight?

It’s a huge undertaking. The traveler has grown enormously more sophisticated, and it takes far more to impress them now. You can’t get away with what you once could. Lasting cultural weight comes from consistency, from taste that can’t be bought or replicated, from service, from best-in-class food and beverage, and from mythology and storytelling. You can’t buy it through PR. You have to deliver on the promises.

Most of all, it comes down to time. Time is your greatest weapon and also the greatest force against you. Many of the greats weren’t immediate successes. I can point to examples I know firsthand. The Greenwich, The Crosby, and The Mark all struggled in their early years, financially and in terms of awareness. It took years to build momentum, and it took real holding power. After five or ten years they looked like overnight successes and became classics. That’s a testament to their conviction, their belief in the product, and their consistency across every discipline.

Cultural weight is earned when a hotel becomes useful to the city, not just impressive to travelers. Geographically we filled a real void at the top of the true Midtown luxury market for an independent, between the 50s and downtown. We added to the fabric of the city. It’s earned when people start using you as a reference point, when they say meet me there. So many people have fallen in love with The Portrait Bar and treat it as a city institution, and that adds to the mythology and the flywheel. It becomes an ecosystem, a constellation of great venues that together make a one-of-one asset. You have to come and feel it to really know it.

Thanks for reading this interview. For more of The Stanza, subscribe to the weekly digest and follow on Instagram.

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June’s podcast interview features David Zisser, founder of Omnam Group and a real estate & hospitality entrepreneur who has achieved impressive scale in Europe through his opportunistic hotel repositioning strategy.

I first heard of Omnam when they acquired the Hotel Bauer in Venice alongside Mohari Hospitality in 2024. (Mohari Hospitality is the family office investing in hospitality businesses such as Tao Group and the Ritz-Carlton Yacht Collection, which had a splashy celeb-filled debut last summer.) Beyond the Hotel Bauer, I’m excited to see the completion of the Park Hyatt Taormina, Four Seasons Puglia, Baccarat Florence, and the creation of their new hotel brand in partnership with Pharrell Williams in Paris.

As an entrepreneur, and not part of an institutional group, David is one of the most prolific hotel developers in Europe. Over the years on The Stanza, I’ve mentioned that one of the best parts of being in real estate is that you could be a single entrepreneur competing in the institutional arena. David is a good example of that, with Bain Capital as one of his LP’s. Therefore, I was interested in knowing more about how he built his portfolio and the lessons he learned along the way. I left this conversation with several insights on the developer’s perspective on the hotel business, which I hope you’ll find equally fascinating.

As always, you’re welcome to write to me with your thoughts.

Best

Nadine

Watch on Spotify or Youtube

Listen on Apple Podcasts

Part I: The Architecture of the Guest Experience

La Bottega Collective designs and produces the physical and sensory touchpoints of the luxury hotel stay, from bathroom formulations and textiles to amenities, gifting, and retail, working with 15,000 properties across 117 countries, from the world’s most recognized hotel groups such as Aman and Four Seasons, to the finest independent properties such as Passalacqua and Il San Pietro di Positano. Tommaso Pacini, CEO of La Bottega Collective, argues that the guest experience is not a collection of amenities but a coherent sensory language, and that the hotels who understand this are the ones building something guests cannot find, replicate, or buy anywhere else.

In Part I of this episode, Tommaso walks through how La Bottega Collective reads a property before designing a single touchpoint, why the choice between licensed and fully custom product programs is ultimately a question of time and conviction rather than budget, and how the most effective guest experience artifacts extend the emotional memory of a stay well beyond checkout.

Thank you La Bottega Collective for making this episode possible.

Learn more and get in touch with La Bottega Collective here.

Follow La Bottega Collective on Instagram here.

Part II: The Developer’s Playbook: Building a €3B European Lifestyle & Luxury Hotel Portfolio with David Zisser

David Zisser is the founder of Omnam, a €3 billion European hotel development and investment platform with a portfolio concentrated in lifestyle and luxury assets across Italy and key European markets. His recent projects include the Edition Lake Como, W Rome, which he credits with catalyzing what W Hotels internally called its 2.0 positioning, and the Hotel Bauer Venice, acquired out of a bankruptcy process in partnership with Mohari Hospitality and flagged with Rosewood. He is currently developing a proprietary hotel brand, with a Paris property featuring Pharrell Williams as creative director serving as its first expression.

Omnam operates across the full development stack, from site identification and capital structuring through to brand selection, design intent, and operational oversight. Omnam’s LPs include institutional investor Bain Capital, and Mohari Hospitality, with whom Zisser has built a partnership center on a shared conviction about where luxury hospitality is heading. Omnam has worked with several major third party operators, and that breadth of exposure now informs both its underwriting discipline and its decision to build its own brand from a position of genuine industry knowledge rather than ego.

In this episode, I sat down with David to explore what it really takes to build a multi-billion euro development platform in luxury hospitality, from navigating fundraising from institutional capital and large family offices to acquiring one of Venice’s most storied hotels out of bankruptcy.

INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS

• David’s deal framework, and why any project where success is contingent on factors outside Omnam’s control is a pass

• How the Hotel Bauer acquisition came together out of a bankruptcy process, with competing global bidders, layered political dynamics, and a timeline that tested everyone involved

• Ultra-luxury brand dilution, and which operators are most exposed as generational wealth transfer accelerates

• David’s view on ADR stabilization, total in-hotel spend capture, and why the P&L conversation that matters most is not the one most investors are having

• Why David believes hotel operators should exit F&B operations, and what a properly aligned fee structure looks like from an owner’s perspective

• The tension at the center of building a scalable brand from a singular, heritage-driven flagship asset

• What David learned from managing institutional capital

Learn more about Omnam’s portfolio here.

Follow Omnam on Instagram here.

Happy Friday.

Summer holiday content is in full force, and thanks to a handful of hospitality brands, you’ll be seeing a lot more of these “yacht cruises” on your feed or in the Med. Today’s letter will be the first of many that attempt to understand the yacht cruise business. If you have any questions, feel free to share by direct replying to this email.

Best,

Nadine

If you’re new here, or want to catch up on the best of The Stanza, I’d recommend that you start here.

In today’s newsletter:

• Everyone asks me whether yacht cruises will work. The better question at this stage is: what is the true guest acquisition cost? Erina Pindar, COO of $1B luxury travel advisory shares some interesting data points on 2026 booking patterns.

• Two C-suite Aman alumni are now running yacht cruise businesses with opposite playbooks. One holds rate and builds six ships, while the other stays under 100 suites and unbundles the fare. Both told me how they're thinking about it.

• A ship is a depreciating asset with no land underneath it. So what are Four Seasons, Aman, and Orient Express actually underwriting when they put their names on hulls?

Read previous issues of The Stanza here.

Wood Fire Cooking and Open Kitchens - F&B Consultant

Stefano Gallizio cut his teeth cooking over open fire under Francis Mallmann in the south of France before taking that philosophy around the world. He went on to help build Osborn’s Fire Kitchen in Australia’s Southern Highlands, widely credited as Australia’s first outdoor fire-cooking restaurant, and later served as Executive Chef at Ember in Byron Bay.

His work sits at the intersection of sensory experience and operational discipline: the kind of food that guests can see being made and remember long after the meal. He now partners with hospitality venues, wineries, hotel groups, and investors to develop restaurant concepts from the ground up.

If you are building a restaurant concept that highlights wood fire cooking and are seeking advice, reach him at stefanoggallizio@gmail.com.

The Stanza is considering an expansion to the Middle East and Asia. If you’re interested in contributing, I’d love to hear from you. The ideal person is:

• Based in Singapore, Hong Kong, Dubai, or Abu Dhabi (at least part time)

• Has institutional hotel real estate / development / operational experience and therefore credibility and an insider’s view on the industry

• Understands the voice and perspective of The Stanza

Submit your interest here. Due to the volume of inquiries, only those that satisfy all three points above will be contacted.

Current listings:

• For Weekly Rent: Villa Epavli, Corfu, Greece (July availability, from €40,000 per week including staff)

• For Weekly Rent: Villa Bagatelle, St. Tropez (From €176,000 per week including staff)

• For sale: Fully-entitled hospitality site in West Hollywood $6M

• For sale: Beachfront 5-Star Boutique Hotel in Mykonos

For all live listings & inquiries (hotels for sale, investment opportunities, open job roles), click here.

Advertise with The Stanza Classifieds: via classifieds@thestanzamedia.com.

Pages from the guest book of Munich innkeeper Hedwig Sonnenschmidt include illustrations from the artists of Simplicissimus, a German weekly magazine (1896–1967) that published political and social satire. The guestbook was auctioned today at Karl & Faber (Lot 738).

“What’s up with yacht cruises?”

There’s a lot of chatter about the yacht cruise business, and lately I’ve been fielding the same question from a lot of people around the viability of this emerging category: “Do you think they’ll work?”

The way I like to look at that question is more: what problem are they solving, and where is the demand coming from? What is the true “guest acquisition cost” for these brands, as the type of person who goes on these cruises is likely spending money that would otherwise be allocated for hotels on a yacht cruise? And as for the investor’s perspective: what’s the long term value creation opportunity? Hotels are on land, which is a finite resource. Typically, a lot of value in hotels comes from the real estate itself for this reason (note: see my previous newsletter on irreplaceable assets). If you can, in theory, build a million luxury cruise ships, and if ships are by definition, depreciating assets, how do you underwrite the terminal value? Or are these ships seen as tax efficient cash flowing assets?

The comp set

Five luxury brands, four of which are hotel operators, now have ships in the water or under construction, and the fleet sizes tell you a lot about each one's bet:

Read more

Happy Friday. Today’s letter is a continuation of previous letters: an exploration into less considered aspects of the hospitality business that have impactful potential. It’s also a very Italian letter! As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts. Feel free to direct reply to this email.

If you’re in Monaco for F1 this weekend and need help booking last minute reservations, download Dorsia using code THESTANZA. You can also get access to fun events such as the HEAVENSAKE party.

Best,

N

If you’re new here, or want to catch up on the best of The Stanza, I’d recommend that you start here.

The latest podcast episode with Anne-Laure Ollagnon, CEO of Airelles, can be found here. Next podcast episode will be published next week.

In today’s newsletter:

• Marie-Louise Sciò’s philosophy on hotel retail is a big part of the reason why Il Pellicano is consistently booked through the summer season

• Carolina Fumagalli is building a new hotel retail operating model that appeals to sophisticated travelers seeking to experience niche Italian craftsmanship

Read previous issues of The Stanza here.

The Stanza is considering an expansion to the Middle East and Asia. If you’re interested in contributing, I’d love to hear from you. The ideal person is:

• Based in Singapore, Hong Kong, Dubai, or Abu Dhabi (at least part time)

• Has institutional hotel real estate / development / operational experience and therefore credibility and an insider’s view on the industry

• Understands the voice and perspective of The Stanza

Submit your interest here. Due to the volume of inquiries, only those that satisfy all three points above will be contacted.

Current listings:

• For Weekly Rent: Villa Epavli, Corfu, Greece (July availability, from €40,000 per week including staff)

• For Weekly Rent: Villa Bagatelle, St. Tropez (From €176,000 per week including staff)

• For sale: Fully-entitled hospitality site in West Hollywood $6M

• For sale: Beachfront 5-Star Boutique Hotel in Mykonos

For all live listings & inquiries (hotels for sale, investment opportunities, open job roles), click here.

Advertise with The Stanza Classifieds: via classifieds@thestanzamedia.com.

What’s the point of hotel retail?

When you think of hotel retail, what comes to mind?

From my personal experience, most hotel retail I’ve seen feels random. Traditionally, hotel retail has been categorized as ancillary revenue. And while that might always technically be the case, the point won’t be about generating substantial revenue from hotel retail (although I’ve seen examples that completely disprove that notion). It’ll be about emphasizing who your hotel is for.

The hotels with the strongest positioning are not selling rooms, because rooms are a commodity. They’re selling proximity to a world the guest wants to associate themselves with, and the rooms are the venue in which the association gets transacted. Typically, travelers and operators have focused on the most obvious outer-facing aspect of world-building, which is the architecture and interior design of a hotel. However, in recent years, smart operators have been increasingly focused on retail as a lever in the exercise of world-building both as a means of expression and of differentiation. As hospitality grows more competitive, the effectiveness of the “world” in selling rooms will be priced into brand value, and therefore hotel retail will transition from an afterthought into a powerful tool to help execute said exercise.

Read more

Happy Saturday. Curious to hear what you all think on the topic of guest curation. I welcome your thoughts - just reply to this email directly.

Best,

N

If you’re new here, or want to catch up on the best of The Stanza, I’d recommend that you start here.

The latest podcast episode with Anne-Laure Ollagnon, CEO of Airelles, can be found here.

In today’s newsletter:

• If a members club can curate its social environment through a membership process, what’s the hotel industry’s equivalent mechanism, and why is almost nobody using it?

• Why the most underrated variable in the guest experience has nothing to do with service, design, or F&B — and everything to do with a specific decision made before the hotel opened.

Read previous issues of The Stanza here.

For Weekly Rent: Villa Epavli, Corfu, Greece

Villa Epavli features direct + private sea access, an infinity pool overlooking the sea, 6 bedrooms (sleeps 12), and comes with a private chef and villa manager. Availability below:

1 - 15 June: €12,500 per week (last minute deal)

6 - 13 July: €40,000 per week

20 - 27 July: €45,000 per week

For more information & to book, email Sabaya: info@isaya.co.uk

For Weekly Rent: Villa Bagatelle, St. Tropez

This beautiful estate spans 4.7 acres comprising 5 independent villas, a padel & tennis court, Technogym fitness studio, sauna, hammam, a cold plunge, an outdoor pool, cinema room, and a panoramic view of the sea. Villa Bagatelle is conveniently located by Pampelonne Beach and St. Tropez town center.

Rates start at €176,000 per week (1 week minimum stay)

For more information & to book, email Sabaya: info@isaya.co.uk

Thank you for your interest in contributing to The Stanza’s potential expansion to Asia and the Middle East. The ideal person is:

• Based in Singapore, Hong Kong, Dubai, or Abu Dhabi (at least part time)

• Has institutional hotel real estate / development / operational experience and therefore credibility and an insider’s view on the industry

• Understands the voice and perspective of The Stanza

Submit your interest here. Due to the volume of inquiries, only those that satisfy all three points above will be contacted.

Current listings:

• For sale: Fully-entitled hospitality site in West Hollywood $6M

• For sale: Beachfront 5-Star Boutique Hotel in Mykonos

For all live listings & inquiries (hotels for sale, investment opportunities, open job roles), click here.

Advertise with The Stanza Classifieds: via classifieds@thestanzamedia.com.

Jacques Garcia acquired the Château du Champ de Bataille in Normandy and undertook a lengthy and costly renovation to revive a masterpiece. Unfortunately it’s not a hotel nor can you rent it for an overnight stay, but it is absolute perfection. Photo from AD France.

The true barometer of hotel perception is not industry press nor opinions from people who do hospitality professionally, but the opinions of guests who have stayed at these hotels and are well-traveled and incredibly savvy. In my recent conversations with friends whom I’d categorize as such, the most interesting question when relaying feedback was always less about service, design, or F&B, but increasingly: “what was the crowd like?” If the answer was negative, I’ve noticed that it disproportionately tainted the person’s view of their experience, regardless of whether or not the other elements of the experience were good. By now, the baseline for any hotel charging €2,000+ ADRs is functional and beautiful design, excellent service, and edible food. Most of the time, these hotels tend to be smaller in key size or have several well-appointed common spaces, and so if the crowd is uninteresting or worse, gauche and rude, it’ll be quite clear and will impact the overall guest experience.

Read more

As the age of information accelerates, we are constantly inundated with content from all directions. The amount of information that has been made accessible by the internet and social media is truly incredible, but I also think it’s important to have a critical eye on the media we consume.

I frequently get asked which writers in the travel space I follow regularly, and here’s my criteria for what I allow in my media diet:

• Originality and uniqueness: The original is always better than the dupe.

• Depth and credibility: I want to know the how and the why, not just the what.

• Devotion to a mastery of their craft: I want to learn from those who strive for excellence.

That being said, here are my current picks:

has been writing about travel (and the business of) for over a decade. He has a sharp column on Skift that often parallels what I write about on The Stanza. His work is read by C-suite at major hospitality groups and I appreciate the honesty and quality of analysis in his writing.

David Prior has an incredible eye for experiences and is able to translate that into beautiful, creative storytelling. I love opening his newsletters to see what destinations are on his radar, and how he would piece together a memorable itinerary.

’s taste particularly resonates with me, and that could be because she started in fashion media. I appreciate how she articulates why hotels and destinations are worth visiting with clarity.

might know every single cool or interesting hotel in Italy. The depth of her knowledge and passion for Italy is truly astounding.

doesn’t need much of an introduction amongst hospitality industry professionals and enthusiasts — she’s been a travel editor at FT HTSI for a while. What makes her work stand out is her unique editorial perspective on places that are less obvious, and her taste which has been developed through lived experience traveling to the places she writes about.

Best,

N

If you’re new here, or want to catch up on the best of The Stanza, I’d recommend that you start here.

The latest podcast episode with Anne-Laure Ollagnon, CEO of Airelles, can be found here.

In today’s newsletter:

• €2,000 is the new €800. New supply is coming. And the ultra-luxury guest has a longer memory than the industry gives them credit for. This week, a direct question for every hotel owner and operator reading this: are you doing hotels, or doing hospitality? The difference matters more now than it ever has.

Read previous issues of The Stanza here.

• I’m thinking of expanding The Stanza to Asia and/or the Middle East. If you are based in either of these regions, passionate about hospitality, and have an insider’s view, please reply to this email and introduce yourself. Institutional investing experience is a must.

• I’m opening the Classifieds section to share sales of properties and fundraises on a complimentary basis for deals that make absolute sense for The Stanza’s audience. No brokers or placement agents please. Happy to share on an anonymous basis as well. Email classifieds@thestanzamedia.com.

Current listings:

• For sale: Fully-entitled hospitality site in West Hollywood $6M

• For sale: Beachfront 5-Star Boutique Hotel in Mykonos

For all live listings & inquiries (hotels for sale, investment opportunities, open job roles), click here.

Advertise with The Stanza Classifieds: via classifieds@thestanzamedia.com.

“Doing hotels” vs “doing hospitality”: what’s the difference?

Hotel owners and operators love talking about “emotional connection” in hospitality, but actually very few realize emotional connection is earned after making the guest feel cared for. That feeling is the emotion, not the emotion created from good branding or good design.

I’ve been reflecting on the delta between perception and reality as it relates to the guest experience at all the hotels I’ve stayed at over the last handful of years. I’m arriving at the conclusion that the greater the delta, the more powerful the PR/marketing engine behind it tends to be. We’re currently in a bull market cycle for hotels, but obviously cycles don’t last forever (even if the general trending long-term pattern is up). At the same time, there is a lot of new supply, both coming online this year and in the near-term, €2,000 is the new €800, and there’s a growing sentiment of disappointment at hotels perceived to be “amazing”.

It really boils down to one question: is ownership “doing hotels” or “doing hospitality”? The former is there to clip a fee, earn a yield, or satisfy an ego desire to own a hotel. The latter genuinely cares about making every guest’s stay special and goes the extra mile, even when they don’t have to. You might immediately start thinking of capital structure, as there’s a common notion that family-owned and independent hotels are always better than flagged or private equity-owned. However, I don’t think the capital structure is the number one factor in answering this week’s question.

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Apologies for the late letter, but it’s another long read and hopefully insightful for you.

Thank you for all your notes on this week’s In The Room featuring Tommaso Pacini at La Bottega Collective.

Some important announcements:

• I’m thinking of expanding The Stanza to Asia and/or the Middle East. If you are based in either of these regions, passionate about hospitality, and have an insider’s view, please reply to this email and introduce yourself. Institutional investing experience is a must.

• I’m opening the Classifieds section to share sales of properties and fundraises on a complimentary basis for deals that make absolute sense for The Stanza’s audience. No brokers or placement agents please. Happy to share on an anonymous basis as well. Email classifieds@thestanzamedia.com.

Best,

N

If you’re new here, or want to catch up on the best of The Stanza, I’d recommend that you start here.

The latest podcast episode with Anne-Laure Ollagnon, CEO of Airelles, can be found here.

In today’s newsletter:

• Why programming return is one of the most misunderstood aspects of operating a hotel, and how the operators getting it right are measuring it instead

• How strong programming self-selects the guest, and why that is the most underrated tool an owner has for protecting long-term rate integrity

• Andrea Franchini, Global Brand Director of Culture and Entertainment at Edition and W Hotels, on the advice he gives to hotel owners and operators who want to build cultural relevance

• Richard Leuenberger, Managing Director of Badrutt's Palace in St. Moritz, on how intentional programming has supported a more than 300% increase in EBITDA over the last decade

Read previous issues of The Stanza here.

Current listings:

• For sale: Fully-entitled hospitality site in West Hollywood $6M

• For sale: Beachfront 5-Star Boutique Hotel in Mykonos

For all live listings & inquiries (hotels for sale, investment opportunities, open job roles), click here.

Advertise with The Stanza Classifieds: via classifieds@thestanzamedia.com.

Does hotel programming move the needle?

As a follow up to last week’s newsletter on relationships as the soft power behind distribution, I’ve been reflecting on my personal experience with another soft power driving hotel retention: programming. It’s a big part of the guest experience that isn’t considered enough by the people capitalizing hotels, even though it can be a powerful tool to create emotional resonance, and therefore drive ADR and room night growth. The flipside is that it requires significant resources to execute thoughtfully.

I had my first horseback riding lesson at Castello di Reschio. It was a sunny, crisp autumn day and I’ll never forget it. The horses at Reschio are purebred Spanish horses; calm, elegant, and majestic. My instructor taught me how to trot in the Teatro Equestre, then we proceeded to ride around the grounds. A couple weeks ago, I shared my horseback riding experience in the gardens of Versailles while staying at Airelles Le Grand Controle. Here, I graduated from the trot to a gallop, and now I’m planning to learn more about my new hobby at these places again, to chase the feeling of being completely in the present moment surrounded by beauty. It’s one example of how hotel programming creates stickiness by facilitating positive memories and emotions. While I know that not every hotel can offer horseback riding lessons, there are versions of programming that can create a parallel stickiness that is accretive to the long-term performance of the hotel.

Now back to the original question: does programming move the needle, and if so, to what magnitude? The answer depends on what kind of hotel you’re operating and what you’re trying to achieve. The mechanism looks different at a lifestyle brand with a global footprint than it does at an independent ultra-luxury property where the hotel's identity is rooted in its destination. I spoke with two operators who sit at opposite ends of that spectrum, and even though there’s an obvious contrast in approach, there’s also a clear fil rouge: the goal of captivating human emotion.

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Tommaso Pacini may have one of the coolest jobs in hospitality. He’s the CEO of La Bottega Collective, which produces and distributes luxury products at most of the world’s best hotels — bathroom kits, robes, slippers, candles, textiles, and everything else that makes the difference between a room and an experience. The next time you stay at a luxury hotel, take a look at the fine print on the bottle of shampoo. Nine times out of ten, it was produced and distributed by La Bottega SpA.

What began in 1981 as a small neighborhood shop founded by Tommaso’s father, Umberto Pacini, has grown into one of the most influential companies in the luxury hospitality world. Today, La Bottega Collective is a group of five specialized subsidiaries operating under one roof — covering beauty essentials, textiles and linens, OS&E, and design consulting — with 20 offices, more than 900 employees, and 15,000 clients across 117 countries. Their portfolio reads like a checklist of the world’s most coveted hotels: Aman, Bulgari, Four Seasons, The Peninsula, Raffles, Ritz-Carlton, St. Regis, and Orient Express, among many others.

What sets La Bottega Collective apart from a conventional supplier is the depth and intentionality of what they do, rooted in a distinctly Italian passion for craftsmanship and quality. Founded in the country that invented the concept of il saper fare — the intuitive mastery of making things well — La Bottega Collective brings that sensibility to every object that leaves their ateliers, whether a signature fragrance developed with a master perfumer, a linen woven from an Italian fiber, or a bespoke slipper embroidered with a hotel’s crest. Each piece is designed to communicate something specific about the property it represents. In Tommaso’s world, the amenity set is not a commodity. It is the physical expression of a hotel’s identity, and possibly the only thing a guest takes home.

I’m excited to announce La Bottega Collective as one of the partners for this year’s podcast. It’s a partnership that feels particularly aligned, as Italy is the home of The Stanza and therefore continues to influence The Stanza’s editorial vision and perspective on hospitality.

Your father founded La Bottega Collective in 1981. What was the problem he was solving for at the time, and how has the business he started 45 years ago evolved to what it is today?

Like many Italian companies, it was born through an opportunistic phone call. We were living close to a port, a cruise ship was landing nearby, and someone contacted my father to provide what I consider one of the most luxurious items in the world: toilet paper. Rather than passing the call to a colleague, he said yes, and started supplying amenities for cruise ships. The natural next step was to move into the hotel industry in Italy. That’s where the magic happened.

It’s not a very charming origin story, but it’s the real one, and there’s a wonderful full-circle moment embedded in it. Several years ago we collaborated with Maurizio Cattelan, probably the most controversial Italian artist in the world, to create a Toilet Paper-themed room at the Sixty Hotel in New York. From my father supplying toilet paper to hotels, to a Toilet Paper room in New York thirty years later. All the dots connected.

For readers who may know La Bottega Collective only from their hotel bathroom, the full scope of the group — Beltrami, Vanity Group, Palatino, White Privé — is likely a surprise. How do you describe the platform and the way its pieces work together?

La Bottega Collective connects back to my father’s original dream. The original name was La Bottega dell’Albergo — “the small Italian shop where you can find everything for the hotel.” We started by selling all kinds of items, but over time, particularly after acquiring our cosmetics factory in 2002, we streamlined around beauty as our core business. When I opened the US market in 2008, La Bottega dell’Albergo was unpronounceable, so we shortened it. But with La Bottega Collective, we’ve returned to that original vision: a one-stop platform for guest experience.

Today the Collective is organized around distinct verticals by product category. La Bottega and Vanity Group cover beauty. Beltrami covers textile. Palatino covers accessories. White Privé is a second-line linen brand sitting alongside Beltrami. Beltrami is not a name many people know, but we consider it the jewel of the organization. It’s intentionally small, with an exceptionally high-profile client list: Amangiri in Utah, Passalacqua in Lake Como, the Ritz Paris. We don’t want to scale Beltrami because scaling it would mean losing its exclusivity. That’s exactly why White Privé exists: a more accessible entry point to grow market share without compromising the flagship.

The verticals are structured so there’s no overlap between them. Each item falls into a defined product category, with a go-to-market strategy built around that discipline.

In 2024, Three Hills invested $115M for just under half of the group, and then the Ruffini family came in for a 14.7% stake in September 2025. That is significant conviction from two sophisticated investors with deep hospitality exposure. What were the highlights of your business that catalyzed their investments, and how has their involvement changed your ambitions for the company?

You should really ask them directly! But I can tell you what I believe, having now been through two rounds of institutional investment, the first with Mediobanca back in 2018.

The channel itself is a major factor. Hospitality — what I now call hospitality at large, because it extends well beyond hotels to restaurants, private clubs, safari lodges, golf clubs — is a sector with a compelling growth trajectory. And both investors understand it intimately. Three Hills through investments like Sant Ambroeus; the Ruffini family through Langosteria. They love hospitality, and we speak the same language. That alignment matters enormously when you’re trying to scale while preserving exclusivity, which is the central tension of this business.

The second factor is global footprint. There aren’t many Italian companies that have built one, and investors backing Italian businesses want to see a credible path to international scale.

The third is the platform vision. What I’m building is a luxury one-stop shop for the hotel – pick up a property, turn it upside down, and whatever falls out, we supply it. Their involvement has sharpened our ambitions on the buy-and-build side. Food and beverage, spa, uniforms: these are all verticals we’re actively evaluating for future acquisitions.

Palatino was your third major acquisition within a year. How do you think about the discipline of integration and preserving each company’s distinct identity while building coherence across the platform?

I became friends with the founders of Palatino and Vanity Group before any transaction happened. And I was clear with both of them: if a founder is ready to exit and walk away, we’re not interested. Every acquisition we’ve done has been structured as cash plus equity, so the founder remains invested as a minority shareholder and stays actively involved in a role that fits their strengths. That structure is a signal that they believe in where we’re going, and it’s the best protection against losing what made the company worth acquiring in the first place.

On quality specifically: the philosophy is to preserve what makes each company exceptional and invest heavily in R&D to keep pushing it forward. Take Palatino: the elegance of their detail work is exceptional. But if the same objects appear in every hotel, they become commodities. And once something is a commodity, it competes on price, which is not a business we want to be in. So the challenge with Palatino is constant invention: new guest experience formats, new objects, new collaborations with international designers that keep the work one step ahead.

La Bottega and Vanity Group are different, because licensing multiple brands means we can offer a different face to different clients. We can work with the Ritz-Carlton because we carry Diptyque. The most recent Corinthia Rome opening used Santa Maria Novella. That side of the business is more naturally scalable, though no less deliberate.

How do you decide which brand to pair with which hotel?

There are two approaches: top-down and bottom-up. Some clients come to us with a specific brand in mind, and we evaluate the fit. Others come with no brief, and our brand and marketing team in Milan scouts for the best match alongside our global sales team. We never present a single option because each brand carries a different heritage and speaks to a different type of guest.

Our catalog is essentially a blank notebook. Our salespeople go into client conversations as interviewers first: Where do your guests come from? What is the brand identity you are building? Is the brief rooted in fashion heritage, fragrance, wellness? From there, the right fit becomes clear.

With so many hotel brands licensing the same cosmetics lines, how do you manage exclusivity across clients?

We are almost obsessive about this. You can gain a lot of market share in one year and lose it all the next if you are not disciplined. For certain brands we have formal agreements with international chains that cap volume. When I worked with Thomas Maier at Bottega Veneta, we had a strict limit of five hotel partnerships per year. The go-to-market and marketing strategy behind every brand placement has to be deliberate, and it is not only about which label of shampoo sits in the bathroom. It is about the storytelling layered around the product.

With the Ritz-Carlton NoMad opening in New York, we partnered with Diptyque to install a Bar Parfum inside the hotel, so the product becomes a destination in itself. With Dr. Barbara Sturm, whom I have been in conversation with for nearly four years, we are launching a program this year that moves well beyond the amenity format and shows up across multiple guest touchpoints.

How much does the design of amenities, bathroom products, slippers, textiles, impact the storytelling of a hotel?

These are among the most powerful touchpoints in the entire guest experience, because they are the one thing guests can take with them. They are not going to take the television or the minibar. Amenities are the memorabilia, and when they are done well they become marketing tools as much as products. We regularly see guests reposting beautifully designed objects on social media, which creates organic visibility for the hotel.

There is a commercial dimension too. The big trend now is hotels building retail concepts in-house, not selling brands you can find in five hundred airports, but things that genuinely belong to the property. COVID helped accelerate this. After two years of lockdown, when people started traveling again, they really wanted to find something that belonged to the place they were staying and to take it home with them.

Has the guest expectation around amenities changed meaningfully since before the pandemic?

I think COVID didn’t destroy channels that were already performing; it stopped businesses that weren’t. The trends I’m describing were already in motion before 2020. The last major project I finalized before the pandemic was The Peninsula Hong Kong: plastic-free packaging, a bespoke scent developed with a local artist for each property in the Peninsula portfolio. Every hotel in the group has a different scent, and they built beautiful storytelling around it, video content, in-elevator retail installations, online and offline sales. Place-specific, locally rooted guest experience was already where the industry was heading. COVID just compressed the timeline.

My view is that the hotel is not my client, the guest is. I can have wonderful relationships with owners and GMs, but if the product doesn’t resonate with the people staying there, the contract doesn’t renew. So we work alongside hotel operators with that perspective always in mind.

Guests increasingly demand experiences that feel singular and tailored, yet they’re staying in properties managed by brands that serve hundreds, if not thousands, of rooms. How do you manufacture genuine bespoke at scale?

It depends entirely on what the brand is trying to say. When we work with Aman, the brief is consistency across properties; the beauty has to hold together globally. When we work with Rosewood, “sense of place” is the entire payoff, so each property gets something different. When we partner with W and Davines, the product is the same everywhere, but the guest experience is crafted locally. At the W Sardinia opening this summer, the beauty was consistent, but everything built around it was specific to the property.

We play across our verticals to determine, together with each client, what has to be consistent globally and what has to be crafted for the property. The trend toward local design, local guest touchpoints, and local sense of place is moving strongly through ultra-luxury, but we are seeing it in broader luxury too. We have worked with Four Seasons for many years, and even there the direction is shifting. We are currently involved in the Four Seasons at Hotel Danieli in Venice. I can’t share details yet, but the brief is something that belongs to Venice, not even to the Four Seasons. The approach at Four Seasons Dallas would be quite different.

There’s an estimated $84T being transferred to Millennials and Gen Z over the coming decade. From your position supplying hotels that have to serve this next generation, what changes are you seeing?

I have the most demanding client in my own house: my daughter, who just turned 20. When I was her age, I dreamed about cars. She couldn’t care less about a car, or about fashion. What she wants is to travel, and every time she travels she wants to be surprised by something she has never seen anywhere else, something she can bring home and share. That, to me, is the brief.

What I have watched evolve in her specifically: at twelve, she was captivated by a well-designed kids’ program at the Four Seasons Maui. At twenty, she cares about skincare, the quality of what is in the room, and whether she can actually buy those items, beautiful pajamas, a well-made t-shirt. What we created for Passalacqua alongside Valentina De Santis is a good example: the objects we developed for the property weren’t hotel products, they were retail products born from a hotel context. That is the direction this is heading.

Where do you see the application of AI in your business? And do the hands of a craftsman still matter in 2026?

They will still matter in 2056. Craftsmanship isn’t going anywhere, and I think we are fortunate to operate in hospitality, because AI is not going to replace the experience of being in a place, or the people who create it.

That said, we would be foolish not to use it. For us, the most meaningful applications are internal: guest profiling, go-to-market strategy, demand forecasting. We are already using AI to anticipate hotel requirements with a precision that manual processes can’t match, and on the design and production side it will meaningfully compress timelines. But the work itself, the material choices, the detail, the judgment, that remains human.

La Bottega started in the Marche countryside in 1981. You now have a showroom in Milan and are expanding to New York and Dubai. What does Italy still offer to the world of luxury hospitality that cannot be sourced elsewhere?

Italians do it better. Jokes aside, the Italian gusto, particularly when it comes to the detail of an object, is something we have always leveraged and will continue to. I am not claiming Italian hotels are the best in the world; there are international properties that are far more sophisticated in marketing or in building iconic status. But when Italy is expressed through any guest touchpoint, through the art of hospitality, the level of attention is something I have rarely seen replicated.

I worked with an owner once who repositioned a vase of flowers by one centimeter because the balance wasn’t right. At the time I thought it was excessive. Now I understand exactly why he did it. That instinct for harmony is what Italy still exports to the world.

Thanks for reading this interview. For more of The Stanza, subscribe to the weekly digest and follow on Instagram.

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Thank you for the incredibly kind notes about my interview with Anne-Laure Ollagnon at Airelles. It excites me to share the stories of hoteliers who are doing hospitality in a unique and interesting way.

Today’s letter is a long one, and I hope it’s one packed with valuable insights for you.

Enjoy,
N

If you’re new here, or want to catch up on the best of The Stanza, I’d recommend that you start here.

Links to the latest podcast episode can be found here.

In today’s newsletter:

• Inside the distribution strategy of the hotels that never need to discount

• The hotels with the most defensible pricing power aren't running bigger sales teams. They're making relationships their competitors have delegated away. What does that look like in practice?

• Most pre-opening budgets are allocated to the wrong things. Luxury hotel PR Jules Perowne on what Passalacqua did instead, and why it went straight to number one on the World's 50 Best

• David Prior designs travel for some of the world's most visible tastemakers. Here is exactly what a hotel needs to have done before it ever gets on his radar.

• SmartFlyer booked over $1B in travel last year. COO Erina Pindar on what the hotels compounding value from the advisor channel are doing

• Belmond CEO Dan Ruff on investing in the guest experience at Villa San Michele

Read previous issues of The Stanza here.

For Sale: Fully-entitled hospitality site in West Hollywood

UPDATED PRICING: $6M

Shovel-ready, four-story ±45,000 SF development approved for F&B and members club uses with rooftop pool, outdoor dining, and alcohol service. A rare, flagship-scale opportunity with no entitlement risk in prime West Hollywood ideal for a globally recognized brand. The current approved plans features indoor/outdoor flow on various levels, separate public and members-only access points, and flexible floor plates for various hospitality concepts.

Other possible use cases include joint-venturing with current ownership, or re-entitling for boutique hotel or mixed-use residential (≈91 units via density bonus).

Inquire here.

Current listings:

• For sale: Beachfront 5-Star Boutique Hotel in Mykonos

For all live listings & inquiries (hotels for sale, investment opportunities, open job roles), click here.

Advertise with The Stanza Classifieds: via classifieds@thestanzamedia.com.

Guido Reni was a 17th century Italian baroque painter who trained under Flemish painter Denis Calvaert, then under Ludovico Caracci (cousin of the prolific Annibale). Guido was known for painting dark and sometimes gruesome allegorical scenes with brush precision, influences of Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro technique, and a lighter palette in his later works. Here, he depicted a story from the Gospel of Mark in the New Testament. John the Baptist had criticized Herod for marrying his own brother’s wife. At Herod’s birthday party, Herod promised his stepdaughter Salome (pictured above), anything she wished after she performed an entertaining dance. At the nudge of her mother, she requested the head of John the Baptist on a platter. This scene has been painted by several other prolific artists, including Caravaggio, but this may be one of my favorite interpretations because of the contrast between Salome’s innocence, beauty, and her extravagant oriental garments, and the timeless human themes of jealousy, revenge, and despair.

• Belmond’s reopening of Villa San Michele after an 18-month renovation has been a focal point of the hotel world recently. In addition to the renovation, they’ve also added a spiritual wellness program with Californian Milanese fashion entrepreneur JJ Martin, a spa by Guerlain, and a new fine dining restaurant by young Tuscan chef Alessandro Cozzolino. With all the additions, I’d describe the renovation as more of a repositioning. Something that isn’t talked about enough in the hotel business is the constant need to be upgrading and investing in the guest experience. Not only do the physical spaces need annual maintenance capex, but the best hotel owners are constantly thinking about how to deliver facilities that attract their target guest. I asked Belmond CEO Dan Ruff how they think about the return profile of experiential investment at historic properties such as Villa San Michele:

  “Experiential investment at historic properties is an act of custodianship, and the returns compound over time through brand equity, guest loyalty, and the enduring relevance of the property itself. Our 18-month restoration of Villa San Michele - fewer rooms, more space, more time to linger - makes Slow Luxury an experiential reality, and that is what sustains value across generations of guests.”

On Distribution & Relationships: The Soft Power Behind The World’s Most Successful Hotels

The best perk of my job is access to a wide variety of hotel owners, investors, and management company CEO’s, and getting an insider’s view on how they operate. A striking observation I’ve been reflecting on lately is that the most commercially successful luxury & ultra-luxury hotels are not necessarily the ones with the largest sales teams or the most sophisticated CRM systems, but ones where the owner or CEO has personally invested in the right travel advisor and editorial relationships, instead of delegating this to their sales & marketing teams. In the context of AI changing online hotel distribution systems, for hotels that strive for true excellence in every aspect, the quality of relationships with the right editors and travel advisors is arguably the most underrated variable in long-term rate integrity. What does it take to build relationships that compound into this kind of soft power?

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I’m very excited to share a behind-the-scenes view of a hotel group doing hospitality in a unique way: Airelles.

Ask any sophisticated traveler what they think of Airelles as a brand, and you’ll either get glowing reviews or feedback that it wasn’t for them. This is exactly why I appreciate how they operate — they’re intensely focused on providing a specific kind of experience and being the best at it, rather than trying to appeal to everyone. As an ultra-luxury hotel group competing in a pool of well-capitalized brands that seemingly want to be on everyone’s radar, it’s a bold and respectable strategy.

Although I almost exclusively talk about hotels on this platform, I rarely share my personal experiences staying at the hotels I talk about. But here is something you should know before you listen to this interview: I loved my experience at Airelles’ Le Grand Contrôle so much that I already began planning my next trip there before check out, and am planning to stay longer next time. Le Grand Contrôle is the only hotel in the Palace of Versailles, and I would describe it more as an immersive experience than a hotel. I had the chance to experience private after-hour tours of Versailles and the Grand Trianon, the private family palace of Louis XIV. I rode a stunning French horse between rows of trees in the garden of Versailles. At the Royal Feast by Alain Ducasse, the staff dressed in 17th century costumes choreographed what was the closest I could get to experiencing dinner at court. It was theatrical, glorious, and unforgettable. If you’ve been a reader of The Stanza for a while, you’ll know that I have a passion for history, particularly of this period, and so this experience was special for me.

Then, there’s the gifting, which Airelles is known for. Each time we returned to our room, we were showered with beautiful gifts that were often customized with our initials, along with endless Ladurée macarons, exotic fruits, and snacks. In case you do stay at an Airelles hotel, I won’t spoil it for you and tell you exactly what they gifted me, but I’ll just say that they took “surprise and delight” to another level. As someone privy to hotel P&L’s, it struck me that they clearly have invested a lot into generosity, which is not the easiest decision when you’re operating smaller hotels. But, this generosity communicates that they’re thinking of how to make guests feel special, and therefore, it’s easy to see why Airelles has a cult following and a high return rate.

This is also Anne-Laure’s first podcast interview, and I’m grateful that despite the fact that Airelles tends to be discreet as a group, she was able to share what it takes to build a hotel brand at this level.

Watch on Spotify or Youtube

Listen on Apple Podcasts

Part I: The Travel Advisor as Curator

00:00:27

Erina Pindar, COO of , argues that the travel advisor’s core product is less about access but more so curation and personalization: the construction of high-emotional-impact moments that exist outside the algorithm and cannot be replicated through self-booking.

In Part I of this episode, Erina walks through how SmartFlyer conceptualizes experiences designed to generate genuine surprise for HNW clients, why safari travel has seen a measurable resurgence in demand post-pandemic, and what the rise of multi-generational, long-stay itineraries signals about how the most valuable travel clients are beginning to define the category for themselves.

This episode was made possible in partnership with SmartFlyer.

SmartFlyer works with hotel owners and management companies looking to access a HNW traveler base that sits outside standard distribution channels. Reach out to learn more.

hello@smartflyer.com

Learn more about SmartFlyer here

Follow SmartFlyer on Instagram

Part II: The Art of Emotional Storytelling: How Airelles Builds Ultra-Luxury Around History & Generosity

00:09:54

Anne-Laure Ollagnon is the CEO of Airelles, the French ultra-luxury hotel group owned by entrepreneur Stéphane Courbit, whose portfolio of historic properties spans France and, as of this month, Italy. She joined the group in 2007 when Courbit acquired the original property in Courchevel, bringing a background in M&A law that shaped her approach to transforming heritage buildings into destination assets.

Airelles follows a full ownership model across almost all of its portfolio: Airelles Courchevel, Airelles Val d’Isère, Château de la Messardière and Pan Deï Palais both in Saint-Tropez, La Bastide de Gordes in Provence, and Palladio Venice on the island of Giudecca.

The one exception is Le Grand Contrôle, the only hotel inside the grounds of the Palace of Versailles, which Airelles operates under a concession with the French government. It is arguably the most precise expression of what the brand stands for: identifying sites of irreplaceable historic significance and restoring them into experiences that could not exist anywhere else. Across all of it, Airelles has grown without third-party management contracts, maintaining direct operational control and brand integrity at every property.

In this episode, I sat down with Anne-Laure Ollagnon to explore what it really takes to build and run an ultra-luxury hotel group rooted in historic properties, emotional storytelling, and a culture of generosity that institutional capital structures are rarely designed to sustain.

Interview Highlights:

• The difference between family office capital and institutional capital in ultra-luxury, and how that impacts the guest experience

• How Airelles won the Palace of Versailles tender against more than fifteen competing hotel groups

• The six-year acquisition and authorization process for Airelles Palladio Venice, and what patience as a development discipline actually costs

• Airelles’ philosophy behind owning and operating distinct hotels

• What Anne-Laure looks for when evaluating a new asset, and why emotion is the first filter before any underwriting begins

• How a high-end hotel under 50 keys justifies its ADR and operates profitably without relying on volume

• Anne-Laure’s view on where ultra-luxury is heading

Learn more about Airelles here

Follow Airelles on Instagram

Follow the latest opening in Venice on Instagram: the Airelles Palladio

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