Gretel Kutan
Luxury Hospitality Projects
EMEA · Globally Flexible
Practice

How I work

Most engagements are senior, interim, and advisory. The brief tends to take one of a few common shapes.

I.
A pre-opening team needs another experienced hand, someone who can move across brand, commercial, and operational questions through the months before launch.
II.
An in-house team needs steady direction during a transition, between department heads, or through a change in leadership.
III.
A new market is being entered, a new asset is being taken on, or a portfolio is being repositioned, and the executive bandwidth required is real but not yet permanent. The right answer is a senior resource brought in for the phase, and released when the permanent team is in place.
IV.
An owner or operator wants an outside view on what is working, what is not, and what a credible path forward looks like.

Across all four, the shape is the same: a senior operator working inside the team for the length of the engagement, without the overhead of a permanent hire.

What I do

Pre-opening support

The months before opening determine the years after. Pre-opening is where the brand is translated into an operation that can actually deliver it: orchestrating the launch, building the sales and marketing function, recruiting and training the team, establishing brand standards on the ground, and managing the owner-operator relationship through the most pressured period of the project's life.

Brand strategy

Most luxury hospitality concepts or assets are not undifferentiated; they are under-positioned. The work is identity, narrative, standards, voice, and multi-property consistency, what lets a property set its own pricing, rather than chase the market's. In practice, this means rolling a brand into a new market, repositioning an existing asset, or building the standards that let a portfolio grow without losing coherence.

Business development

Owners and operators rarely lack opportunities. What is scarce is the judgement to identify the right ones, structure them properly, and bring them through to signed contract without the deal degrading along the way. The work covers framing the growth path, originating opportunities in target markets through direct network access, and managing the relationships across owners, capital, and legal that make complex deals close.

Marketing & Sales

Most luxury operators have a marketing function and a sales function that are run separately and measured separately, with the brand position sitting underneath both and absorbing the cost of the misalignment. The work is running them as one commercial function: channel mix, the rhythm of the operating year, partnerships, agency direction, and the in-house team, held to the brand the asset is trying to be, and the revenue it is trying to earn. In practice, this means marketing accountable for revenue contribution and sales accountable for brand fit, not for the gross number alone.

Each project is built around the specific asset, stage, and people involved. The right shape becomes clear in conversation.