Lodging Leaders

This week, Lodging Leaders focuses on women in hospitality, and the long road ahead for those who want a lead role in the industry.

This week, Lodging Leaders focuses on the scourge of human trafficking and its impact on the U.S. travel industry, including hotels.

• Brad Myles, CEO of Polaris, operator of the National Human Trafficking Hotline
• Ed Bastion, CEO of Delta Air Lines
• Camila Wright Zolfaghari, vice president of policy at the trafficking-prevention group called Street Grace in metro-Atlanta
• Megan Lundstrom, a survivor of sex trafficking, and founder of Free Our Girls in Denver, Colorado.
• Vipul Dayal, hotelier, and charter member of the San Diego Hotel/Motel Human Trafficking Awareness Partnership Initiative

This week, Lodging Leaders focuses on Mitch Patel and his company, Vision Hospitality Group in Chattanooga, Tennessee. We will hear from Mitch about how he has remade Vision Hospitality Group to capture new segments of travelers and capitalize on new and emerging trends in guests’ needs, wants and expectations. We also hear from others involved in Vision Hospitality Group’s remake.

Judy Maxwell is a veteran news journalist of more than 30 years. She has been a staff writer and editor at newspapers in Pennsylvania and Georgia. Most of her career has been dedicated to covering business news and events. Over the past seven years, Judy has worked with Asian Media Group, publisher of Asian Hospitality, a B2B trade magazine that covers the hotel industry and caters to the Asian American hotel community. Judy was managing editor of AMG’s U.S.-based operations. While there she led the redesign and rebranding of the magazine and its daily news website. She launched a weekly e-newsletter and led the development of Priya, a magazine for entrepreneurial women. She also led special projects, such as leadership roundtables and supplemental reports on investment and development trends in the U.S. hotel industry.

During her career, Judy has won numerous awards for her reporting, including first-place recognition for investigative journalism from the Georgia Press Association; first-place for column writing from the Pennsylvania Publisher’s Association; and first-place for feature writing from the Associated Press Managing Editors.

She earned fellowships from the Knight Center for Specialized Journalism to study the U.S. and global economy, and most recently she received a certificate in multimedia storytelling from Poynter News University and Valdosta State University.

• Our vision for the new Lodging Leaders and what our followers can expect in the weeks to come.

Horst Schulze is Founder, Chairman and CEO of the Capella Hotel Group, and Co-founder & Former COO of The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Co. Schulze is a legendary leader and global titan of business and the author of Excellence Wins: A No-Nonsense Guide to Becoming the Best in a World of Compromise (Zondervan/HarperCollins). His visionary and disruptive principles have reshaped the concepts of excellence, service, and competitive advantage, transcending divisions of industry across the business landscape.

In 2002, Schulze founded a second company, The Capella Hotel Group, raising the bar set at the Ritz-Carlton even higher to pioneer the first “ultraluxury” guest experience. Schulze is a highly sought after keynote speaker for numerous global businesses and organizations. He and his wife, Sheri, live in Atlanta, Georgia.

• The history of Ritz Carlton, from the first hotel built in the late nineteenth century, to the formation of The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, LLC in 1983.
• The powerful vision behind the iconic phrase “Ladies and Gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen”, a phrase Horst penned in an essay he wrote as a teenager.
• The grander view customer service, whose role it is, and why it determines success.
• His new book, Excellence Wins: A No-Nonsense Guide to Becoming the Best in a World of Compromise.