I thought I was taking a break.
Turns out, a hospitality person is always a hospitality person. It is less a job and more a lifelong condition. You cannot check into a hotel or stand in a lift line without quietly analyzing operations and incentives.
A few days in Zermatt with my daughter became an unexpected case study.
Before anything else, thank you to Beryl, who made it feel like home from the start. The best local spots. Inside perspective. The kind of connection no AI or concierge could replicate.
We booked last minute.
Ski school.
A nanny.
A hotel.
It felt seamless.
Well, almost.
Most ski schools were fully booked. Not exactly frictionless. But when I mentioned that I had learned to ski there years ago, somehow a spot opened up.
Relationships still matter.
Connection to place still matters.
Relationships still outperform algorithms.
We had a big plan. Rented fat skis. A proper lunch in Cervinia.
Instead, we had a two hour border control delay. Missed our train. The power went out this morning. Most lifts have been closed. So far, I have managed exactly one green run.
And somehow, there is very little anxiety about any of it.
In a less corporatized environment, friction feels forgivable. People adjust. The experience absorbs imperfection.
There is an unspoken rhythm here. Work to live, not live to work.
There is something about:
Real glasses instead of plastic cups.
A proper glass of wine.
Food that feels local rather than programmed.
Staff who genuinely live here and love the mountains.
Yes, lifts are closed. The one open funicular is crowded. Queuing is chaotic. Communication is imperfect.
But the mountain still feels like a place, not a system.
This is not really about skiing.
Skiing here feels fundamentally different from large US resorts owned by groups like Vail or Alterra.
In highly corporatized environments, operations are technically sophisticated, data driven, centrally programmed, highly optimized and often robotic.
The mountain becomes a product rather than a place.
That tension mirrors what we see across hospitality real estate.
As ownership consolidates and capital becomes more institutional, reporting improves. Margin discipline improves. Capital efficiency improves.
Efficiency matters.
But can experience scale?
I have spent my career finding and creating value in hospitality and translating that value into the talent owners need to execute it. The best asset managers do not simply drive KPIs and BI dashboards. They enhance operational effectiveness while protecting the soul of the asset.
If authentic experience creates pricing power and resilience across cycles, over optimization becomes quietly value destructive.
We can model RevPAR.
Can we model memory?
Markets price experience.
And in hospitality real estate, experience is the asset.