What I'm Excited About in Hospitality Now - Gilda Perez-Alvarado, Accor

Show Notes
Transcript

Gilda Perez-Alvarado is the CEO of Orient Express and Group Chief Strategy Officer at Accor. In this episode, she shares what she's excited about in the world of hospitality today.

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.

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

Questions, comments, or suggestions? Get in touch with me (Josiah) here or on LinkedIn - I'd love to hear from you.

Transcript

Josiah: You have this global perspective on hospitality. What are you most excited about in the world of hospitality right now?

Gilda: Oh, so many things. One is obviously the role of technology and what we can do there, you know, in a very positive way. Obviously, there are very negative implications that people are worried about in terms of AI, etc. But I do think that we can do a lot of really great things. We need to embrace that. Wellness, well-being, et cetera. That's a very important new dimension that is starting to become a little bit more present in hospitality above and beyond just a spa, right? I was having a conversation with a friend of mine who was talking to me about well-being from a performance perspective or an optimization perspective as a human, right? Making sure that everything is aligned, mind, body, soul. So there are many different dimensions of it. From a placemaking perspective, the applications of hospitality above and beyond the hotel. So that is very interesting, especially the idea of placemaking, community making. That is incredibly important. And, you know, we're in a very interesting time right now. The world order keeps on changing by the day. New destinations are emerging. Older destinations are thinking about how to become relevant. We're talking about sustainability. So, honestly, the world is our oyster. There's so much to do. There's a role for everybody. And this is by far the most beautiful industry in the world. So it'd be great to see more and more people want to get into it.