Luxury Ambassador of the Month

Rebecca Masri, Founder of Little Emperors – an exclusive collection of high-end hotels and a member of the Virtuoso Consortium – had an unexpected entry to the travel industry. Having already found success as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs, one day she found a big opportunity for what she describes as "the accidental business."

"I don't really have a big romantic story behind it. I went straight into investment banking right after I graduated and spent about ten years at Goldman Sachs. When the financial crisis hit in 2008, a lot of things changed, as you can imagine. For me, I saw a shift in hotel travel programs that were available to corporate after this crash.

Management at Goldman, like at many companies, had removed a lot of luxury products from their approved travel lists, but there was still demand. There were people – individuals that is, not their companies – who had the budget for it and wanted to travel in luxury, but had lost their access to corporate rates even though they were traveling for work. That was especially true for a massive number of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), who historically had trouble getting access to these rates in the first place.

On the other side, the hotels were scrambling to get corporate business back into the door since their accounts had all been cancelled. That's when I started reaching out to the hotels to negotiate corporate rates directly for myself, and on behalf of others to leverage our buying power.

That was never possible before, because rates had always been settled between formal corporate entities. Soon thereafter I ended up with a really large number of hotels for which I was on a preferred rate basis. It was mid-2009 and it wasn't long before people were asking me for rates that I'd negotiated myself. At the time I ended up thinking, 'I can't do this and work. Let me just hire someone who can manage this, and to cover her salary I'll charge an annual fee to people who want access to corporate rates.'

Within a year we had over 10,000 members, so there was a clear business model. It picked up super quickly – it was like the accidental business. I remember joking with people that 'If we make it to 10,000 I'll quit,' and that happened much faster than I thought! In 2010, I resigned to do this full time.

So I entered the travel world from banking, and I was completely lost for a long time with so many acronyms, etc. But luckily there are a lot of really kind people in the industry that took me under their wings and said, 'Look, we know you don't have the background, but we'll figure it out.'

Since I come from finance I'm completely mathematical. My brain looks like some sort of spreadsheet. I think in travel you need to be somewhat creative to succeed. It was a real challenge for me to shift from an industry where it's about numbers and productivity into another industry which is very much about relationships and hosting and knowing people. Luckily I have my sister with me, who is creative, as well as another member of my team who head up partnerships for us.

About five years later in 2017, we had a really good meeting with Starwood Hotels. They turned around and said to me, 'Look, you've got a really good corporate business. You've got the ear of people and they trust you – you should get into leisure.'

I was quite reluctant at the time, because we were so good at what we were doing I didn't want to risk it. But it was our best decision, and we quickly became a preferred partner for pretty much every luxury hotel group since we already knew them. It was then that we decided to go down the tech route.

Today we are – proudly – a tech company. And we work in an industry that has terrible tech. It relies on archaic systems, and today every single luxury hotel group has identified that their clients are getting younger. So they're really making moves to change the way they do things – presenting the property, design, the experiential component, sustainability, wellness – but we've yet to see someone change the booking process. That younger generation has of course, a completely different way of booking hotels.

So we invested in tech and launched our own app in 2018, called Myle. That's our focus as a business now, which is super content-driven – we use high quality visuals, including videos, because younger clients buy with their eyes. So we totally reshaped the way we present hotels to our client base.

We've also created some very useful booking features on the app. This ranges from availability notifications, where a client gets an alert if a fully-booked hotel puts a room back on GDS (and by the way, that has a very high conversion rate for us), and we're about to launch a feature where they can auction a room they booked if they can no longer go on their trip (within cancellation policies).

This year we jumped onto the American trend and launched an Independent Consultant (IC) network. We call them "Mylos" (after our app), and that is pure tech. The ICs, who are travel advisors with their own businesses, have features like a dashboard where they see their bookings, a PDF-generator that allows them to do near-instantaneous quotes that have all the relevant information for their clients (which used to take hours), among other great tools.

And we're constantly developing our platforms, as well as our own AI, so our tech journey is a long one. And I'm constantly on the go going to web summits, sitting on tech boards, speaking on tech panels – really trying to push the tech envelope in an industry that seems resistant or sometimes confused about what's going on.

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