Reflections on a conversation with Nino Kurtskhalia, lebua Hotels and Resorts, Bangkok
One of the things I have always believed, and tried to practise throughout my own career, is that the most interesting people in hospitality are rarely the ones who followed the textbook route. The ones who came up through the ranks in the expected sequence, ticking boxes and collecting certificates, sometimes end up knowing every procedure and very little about how to actually lead. The people who arrived from somewhere else, who had to figure it out fast, who had no institutional safety net to fall back on, they tend to develop a different kind of instinct.
Nino Kurtskhalia did not set out to work in hotels. She spent seven years in container shipping before someone she trusted offered her the general manager role at a boutique hotel opening in Tbilisi. She told him no. She had no hospitality background and was honest about it. He persuaded her. She said yes and decided that if it did not work out, it would not be for lack of effort.
The hotel opened in 2017 and was, by any measure, a success. Then COVID arrived, the doors closed, and Nino found herself applying for a UNWTO grant to help train guesthouse owners in a Georgian mountain region her family had roots in. She did not get the grant. She got a full scholarship instead, which sent her to Les Roches in Switzerland for a second MBA in global hospitality management. From there, a career placement team mentioned lebua in Bangkok. She had never visited Thailand. She took the job anyway, moved without having seen the country, and has been there almost four years. She has changed roles within the organisation three times in that period.
I tell you this not to summarise a CV, but because the shape of that journey matters. It explains how she thinks.
What trust actually means in a professional context
When I asked Nino what she believed drew people to offer her opportunities she had no obvious qualification for, she gave me a straightforward answer. The person who first offered her the GM role knew her well. He knew that when she said she would do something, she did it. He trusted her.
That might sound simple. It is not. Trust in a professional context is not the same as liking someone or finding them easy to work with. It is the confidence that if they say they will handle something, you do not need to check. That is a quality that takes years to build and is very quickly destroyed. Nino identified it correctly as the reason someone would hand a general manager position to a person with no hotel experience. He was not betting on her sector knowledge. He was betting on her.
I could relate to this from my own experience. I have been in situations where people gave me responsibilities I was not obviously ready for, and I have done the same with people in my own teams. What you are looking for when you make that call is not a perfect track record. It is evidence that the person will not let you down.
Reading markets that no longer behave as they used to
One of the things Nino said early in our conversation has stayed with me. She was talking about forecasting and the way the industry used to function: you looked at your historical data, identified patterns, built your projections from there. That approach, she said, no longer works. The variables are too many and arrive without warning.
Last year, an earthquake affected Bangkok. Unexpected, damaging to confidence, damaging to forward bookings. This year, the situation in the Middle East reduced long-haul flights and pushed up costs across major source markets. Neither of those appeared on any forecast model twelve months earlier.
Her point was not that data is useless. It is that relying on data as a substitute for judgement is dangerous. You use historical patterns as a reference, not as a map. And you stay close enough to what is actually happening in the world to catch a shift before it hits your numbers.
At lebua, 52 per cent of hotel guests come from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Europe. When transatlantic flight costs rise, that is felt immediately. Nino's response was to look hard at which markets could compensate. The Indian market was well timed, given that April through to early June represents peak outbound travel season for that segment. The team moved quickly, increased investment in markets they had always had but never led with, and adjusted.
That kind of pivot requires something you cannot fake: you have to know who your guests are, what they want, when they book, and what messaging will actually reach them. The formula Nino kept returning to throughout our conversation was the same one: right customer, right product, right time. It sounds like a marketing textbook. In practice, it requires very precise data literacy and the organisational agility to act on what the data is saying.
Data, AI, and the question of what stays human
Nino hired a data analyst earlier this year, a role whose entire purpose is to reconcile information from multiple platforms across the hotel and its eleven food and beverage outlets, and turn that into actionable briefs for each department. Marketing gets guidance on which keywords to use in a campaign, what time of day to launch it, and which markets to target. F&B gets visibility on when peak traffic periods are likely, so they can manage the operation around real intelligence rather than guesswork.
When I raised the question of AI as a commercial tool, Nino was clear-eyed about both its value and its limits. It is useful for analysis, for identifying patterns, for taking routine tasks off people's plates. It is not a substitute for brand judgement. She made the point that AI will recommend based on what the data says, and the data is drawn from across the internet, from behaviour patterns across many different brands and properties. It does not know, and cannot know, what makes lebua specifically lebua. That is the part only the people inside the organisation can supply.
I have seen this go wrong. A tool produces suggestions that are technically defensible based on search volume or sentiment data, and someone acts on them without asking whether the output fits the brand they are representing. The result is content that could have come from anywhere, which is precisely the problem. A brand that sounds like every other brand is not a brand. It is background noise.
One exchange that stuck with me was about AI-powered search. Nino does a regular exercise where she queries AI tools about lebua from different devices and accounts to see what comes back. The results are not always accurate. Old information surfaces. Details from publications years out of date are presented as current. She is now deep in a new website project, and one of her specific goals is ensuring that the information which feeds AI search results reflects where the property actually is today, not where it was in 2019.
This is a genuinely important point, and I suspect most properties are not paying nearly enough attention to it. If a potential guest asks an AI assistant to suggest hotels in Bangkok, the quality of information that comes back about your property depends on what the AI has indexed, which depends on what you have published and how it has been structured. That is a new category of commercial work, and it sits squarely in the gap between marketing, technology, and brand management. It is exactly the kind of role Nino has carved out.
Sustainability as a commercial argument
Nino is also chair of lebua's sustainability committee, and the conversation moved naturally into that territory. She pushed back on something that I think still persists in ownership circles: the idea that sustainability is a cost rather than a revenue line.
She broke it into three angles. First, guests. Research consistently shows that travellers are more likely to return to and advocate for properties they perceive as responsible. lebua turns that into direct commercial activity: certification badges on booking platforms act as filters that some guests specifically use. Emotional connection with the brand is strengthened when guests feel the property shares their values.
Second, operational savings. lebua is in the process of replacing its air conditioning systems across the property with more energy-efficient models. When the project is complete, energy consumption drops by over fifty per cent. In a building the size of lebua State Tower, with eleven F&B outlets running in Bangkok's climate, that is a very significant cost reduction. Sustainable procurement and food waste management work the same way: what you stop wasting stops appearing on the cost side of the ledger.
Third, and this resonated with me most directly, staff. Nino described the town hall meeting held with lebua's six hundred team members at the start of the sustainability programme. Before asking anyone to do anything differently, the team explained why. Why the changes were being made. What the impact would be if they engaged, and what the impact would be if they did not. The survey data afterwards showed that almost everyone understood the purpose. When one or two said they did not, that was taken seriously rather than brushed aside.
This matters. You can issue a directive and monitor compliance. Or you can build genuine belief in what you are doing, and then the staff become the programme rather than just following it. Nino has guests making pledges in the hotel lobby, with lebua planting a tree in the Bangpu mangrove for each one. Seventy-three pledges on Earth Day. That is not a gesture. That is a community, and communities come back.
The sustainability point I raised from my own experience was around uniforms, and specifically the work we did at Hotel ICON with Crestwell Attire. We moved to sustainable fabrics, materials drawn from bamboo, recycled plastic bottles, hemp. The durability was significantly better than conventional uniforms. The staff were involved in the process, giving feedback on fit and function, pocket placement and fabric feel, so the final product reflected what they actually needed to wear through a shift. They took ownership of it. Guests noticed it and talked about it. And the supply chain model meant staff could order directly, cutting out the warehousing and administrative overhead entirely. The old uniforms went back for down-cycling. Nothing was wasted. It was one of those initiatives that worked commercially, environmentally, and as a piece of staff engagement all at once.
What actually distinguishes a great brand
I asked Nino directly, near the end of our conversation, what she believed would separate the brands that matter in five to ten years from those that simply fill beds. Her answer brought us back to where the conversation had started.
Listen to your guests. Understand what they need. Offer what they are expecting. And then go a step further and create something they will remember.
She made the point that leisure travellers are investing something more than money when they travel. They are investing time they have waited months for, energy, anticipation. When they arrive, they want to feel that the experience was made for them. Not a programme that applies to everyone identically. Something that felt considered, individual, real.
lebua has guests who have been returning for twenty years. Nino has met one personally. He does not consider staying anywhere else when he visits Bangkok, not because he cannot afford to, but because there is an emotional tie that overrides any competitive consideration. That is the hardest thing to build and the most durable asset a hospitality business can have.
You cannot create that through a loyalty points scheme. You create it by having people on the floor who care, who are supported by an organisation that takes their development and their wellbeing seriously, and who are empowered to make a guest feel seen rather than processed. Technology helps. Data helps. But the moment the guest looks up and needs something, what matters is whether there is a person there who actually wants to help them.
That was the consistent thread running through everything Nino said. The intelligence, the data, the AI tools, the digital strategy: all of it exists to make it easier for the right people to deliver the right experience at the right moment. None of it replaces the human being at the centre of it.
That seems to me exactly right.
Nino Kurtskhalia is Senior Director of E-Commerce and Digital Experience and Chair of the Sustainability Committee at lebua Hotels and Resorts, Bangkok. This piece is based on a conversation recorded for the Crestwell EDIT podcast series.