Hospitality got me at sixteen.
I never got over it.

I saw the country young, from a big-box hotel bed.

Every state. Every capital. And in most of them, a room in a hotel with hundreds of others just like it: a line at the desk, a key card, a door that closed behind you. Clean, fine, forgettable. For sixteen years that was what a hotel was, as far as I knew.

Then a hotel welcomed me, and I understood the whole thing.

The Andreas was the first time a hotel felt like being welcomed into someone's home. By eighteen I was working its front desk. We poured a glass of champagne for every guest at arrival. We rolled oshibori towels, iced them, scented them with lavender and carried them out to the pool with frozen champagne grapes. We walked every guest to their room and told them the history of the place. Sinatra in the lobby. A candy bar at night. A real breakfast in the morning.

I was hooked, and I have never worked in anything else.

255 rooms, two bars, two restaurants, a spa, and every kind of guest.

I was the right hand to the operation: the spa, the gym, housekeeping, and the guest scores for all of it. I built the programs that moved those scores. Chips and salsa and a margarita at check-in. Managers in the lobby with the guests, on purpose. We climbed into the top four hotels in Palm Springs on TripAdvisor.

A college fraternity on one side of the property and a national cat show on the other, the same weekend, and both go home happy.

Luxury is the senses. No detail left alone.

A 46-room boutique that went Mediterranean and Moroccan in a valley full of mid-century modern, and pulled it off. L'Occitane in the bath. Frette on the bed. An award-winning chef in the kitchen. Events for brands like Levi's. I worked beside one of the best sales strategists in independent hotels and watched her build an empire out of 46 rooms.

The bank, the build, and the week the world closed.

Two openings where I first sat across from a lender with numbers I had built myself: ADR, RevPAR, the whole projection. Then I put on boots and did the build, every walkway, every gas line, every square inch. When the pandemic hit, we rolled out self check-in before anyone thought it was cool, and with exterior corridors we kept taking guests while others closed.

That is where I fell for the technology. Not for its own sake, but for what it frees people to do: the handwritten note, the wax seal on the envelope, the small things that are the whole point.

Many markets, one portfolio, and the same question every morning.

The Twist, turned from condos and short-term rentals into a real hotel. The Paloma, opened to $1.5M in its first year. Properties in mountain towns, Palm Springs, Cathedral City and Ottawa, each with its own market and its own answer: group business or single-night rooms, which booking sites, which rate, which systems. Then the money beyond the room: concierge programs, private chefs I hired myself, events for brands like Hugo Boss.