March 5, 2024

How To Think 10 Steps Ahead, Solve Hard Problems With Strategy, And Stand Out - Caitlin Ornitz, Champagne Hospitality

In this episode, Caitlin Ornitz, Vice President of Strategy at Champagne Hospitality, draws from her background in management consulting with McKinsey & Company to share how she pushes through tough industry problems to stay ahead of competitors, innovate, and attract guests. Listen to gain insights on how to empower your team, make big bets, and position your hospitality business to be durable and relevant for years to come.

You may also enjoy:

Our other episode with Caitlin: How Our Hotels Become Community Pillars, Delighting Neighbors and Guests Alike
Building Sustainable Luxury with Denise Dupré, Founder of Champagne Hospitality
Our other episodes on strategy

This episode is brought to you with support from Sojern. Finding and appealing to travelers online means getting to know them, and that's why first-party data - the information you have about your guests - is so important to providing hospitality today. I teamed up with Sojern to study how hoteliers are using this data to drive revenue and build stronger guest relationships, and you can see what we found in this research report: How Hotel Brands Are Using First-Party Data to Drive Revenue & Build Stronger Relationships.

Music by Clay Bassford of Bespoke Sound: Music Identity Design for Hospitality Brands

Transcript

Caitlin: I worked as a management consultant before coming to Champagne Hospitality. I was McKinsey & Company, a large management consulting firm, not focused exclusively on hospitality. So it was very much like an outside view of the hospitality industry, which I think is actually pretty rare. Many folks in our industry grow up through the ranks and go through all the steps. And I frankly was on that path. I was at Starwood in an internship when it was acquired back in the day and went to Montage and I had a wonderful experience there. But I took the conscious step to go outside of the industry to learn how other people dissect problems. in a very successful way. So it's very clear that it was at the time, it was clear to me that McKinsey knew how to like piece apart industry specific problems and find solutions to them. And so I spent a lot of time when I was there, specifically in the banking sector and in real estate. So I'm not touching hotels very much. I mean, I did some travel related things too, but I spent a lot of time in finance related industries. And what I learned was really how to dissect a problem that on its face seems very nebulous, so you don't really know where to start, and then people like tend to brand these as like, oh, that's like an industry problem. That's something we all face and it's insurmountable, right? and you learn how to really piecemeal it into things that you can control and figure out what makes sense for you. So, I'm very much a strategist by training.

Josiah: To bring that to life, can you briefly touch on a project that you went through so people can conceptualize the elements of what that process looks like?

The rest of this transcript is available exclusively to members of the Hospitality Daily Huddle.

Caitlin Wischermann Ornitz

Vice President of Strategy

Caitlin Wischermann Ornitz is the Vice President of Strategy at Champagne Hospitality, a luxury hotel collection with properties in Champagne and Burgundy in France and St. Barths in the Caribbean. She is a fourth-generation hotelier and applies a strategist mindset to the industry where she has her roots.

She was formerly a strategist at McKinsey & Company where she provided management consulting services directly to clients and industry insights to the public through the think tank McKinsey Global Institute. Her time was spent primarily with finance and real estate clients on topics related to growth and sustainability. Caitlin lives in New York and joined McKinsey after completing her MBA at Columbia Business School. Caitlin graduated magna cum laude from Cornell University, College of Arts & Sciences as a triple-major in Economics, German Studies, and Comparative Literature.