The CEO Job Nobody Prepared For: Leading Travel, Hospitality & Leisure in the Platform Era

The language CEOs use to describe their companies has changed in ways that reveal something bigger happening beneath the surface. 

When Accor CEO Sébastien Bazin said that “digitalization and data are the new gold for enhancing bespoke guest experiences,” he wasn’t talking about improving hotel operations. He was describing a different business entirely. One where the CEO job looks nothing like what traditional hospitality leaders trained for. 

That gap between what the CEO role used to be and what it needs to become is wider than most boards realize. 

What the Job Used to Require

The CEO role in travel, hospitality, and leisure was built around operational mastery. Airline CEOs understood route economics, fleet utilization, labor negotiations, and regulatory compliance. Hotel CEOs knew property operations, franchise relationships, brand management, and capital allocation for real estate. Logistics CEOs optimized networks, managed warehouses, and extracted efficiency from every mile driven. 

These skills built empires. A CEO who could improve load factors by three percentage points, increase occupancy rates by five points, or reduce delivery times by 10% was doing the job well. The business stayed in a defined category. Airlines moved people between airports. Hotels provided rooms. Logistics companies transported goods. The CEO’s job was to be better at that thing than competitors. Better execution. Lower costs. Higher service levels. That formula worked for decades. 

It worked because customers accepted the boundaries. Booking a flight, arranging ground transport, reserving a hotel, and coordinating luggage delivery were separate transactions that the customer managed themselves. The friction was just part of traveling. But 90% of travelers now say they value personalization when planning a trip, according to a 2024 survey. They want coordination, not separation. Orchestration, not transactions. The old boundaries have become unacceptable to them. 

What Changed the Role

When Riyadh Air CEO Tony Douglas unveiled the airline’s digital strategy in late 2024, he called it his “Steve Jobs moment.” The airline, which started operating in 2025, won’t think of itself as an airline. Douglas said the goal was to make Riyadh Air have “more in common with Amazon, noon.com, and Uber” than other airlines. The app will include a shopping basket to add flight tickets, attraction tickets, and rental cars in one transaction. 

That statement captures what has changed. The CEO job is no longer about perfecting operations within your category. It’s about owning customer relationships across an entire journey. The question isn’t “How do we run the best airline?” The question is “How do we own the traveler’s experience from decision to destination?” That reframing changes everything about how a CEO must think, invest, and operate. 

Research shows that 68% of guests would spend more when offered personalized experiences, yet 56% of hospitality executives feel they lack the technology to deliver it. That gap represents the leadership challenge. CEOs trained to optimize what exists struggle to build what doesn’t yet exist. The skills that made them successful operators don’t prepare them to become platform architects. 

Tony Fernandes illustrated this with AirAsia, launching what he calls a “super app” in October 2020. He didn’t just run a low-cost carrier. He layered e-commerce, logistics, hotel booking, and consumer services onto the airline base. The company repositioned itself as a “digital lifestyle company, anchored on travel” rather than just an airline. That reframing captures what has changed. The CEO job is no longer about perfecting operations within your category. It’s about owning customer relationships across an entire journey. 

Three Ways the Role Has Changed

We’ve watched this play out across dozens of CEO searches in the last three years. The role has changed in specific ways that traditional career paths don’t prepare leaders for. 

1. From optimization to orchestration  
    
   The old CEO job was about making your part of the value chain work better. Get more passengers on each flight. Increase occupancy rates. Reduce delivery times. The new CEO job is about connecting multiple parts of a customer journey that used to be separate. This requires building partnerships with companies you used to ignore, creating data systems that span organizational boundaries, and thinking about revenue models that don’t fit in traditional finance categories. 
    
   The challenge shows up clearly in our work. We see talented operators who can run exceptional airlines or hotels but struggle when boards ask them to articulate a platform strategy. Their entire careers taught them to focus inward on operational metrics. The new role requires them to think outward about ecosystem value. Those are different mental models. A CEO who spent 25 years optimizing load factors may not have the language or frameworks to discuss why integrating ground transport and hotel bookings into a unified customer experience matters strategically. Sometimes that CEO can develop those capabilities. Sometimes the board needs to look for different experience. 
    

2. From budget discipline to technology investment 
    
   According to Skift and AWS research, 83% of executives increased their AI budgets in 2024, and 89% said generative AI will have a meaningful impact on their business in the next three years. This spending represents strategic investment in capabilities that enable new business models, not operational maintenance. 
    
   Automation is expected to save the travel and hospitality industry up to $2 billion annually, and AI and machine learning will manage over half of all travel bookings by the end of 2025. The CEO who sees technology as a cost problem will make different decisions than the CEO who sees it as platform investment. Those different decisions compound over time. They determine whether your company owns customer relationships or just provides commoditized services. The distance between those two outcomes grows wider each quarter. 
    
   Wyndham CEO Geoff Ballotti noted in early 2025 that 2024’s successes “have both Wyndham and our franchisees well positioned for the years ahead” specifically because of investments in “the industry’s best tech platform.” That’s a CEO framing technology as strategic differentiation, not operational overhead. That framing influences every budget conversation, every partnership discussion, every decision about where to allocate capital. 
    

3. From brand steward to narrative builder 
    
   The hardest part for most CEOs is explaining to investors, boards, and employees why the company needs to become something it has never been before. An airline CEO spent 25 years being celebrated for operational discipline. Now the board wants to hear about ecosystem partnerships and platform revenue models. Everything in that CEO’s experience says to focus on load factors and turnaround times. Everything in the new reality demands they talk about orchestrating customer journeys. 
    
   Those are different vocabularies. Different mental models. Different definitions of success. A CEO who can’t translate between them struggles to bring the organization along. The employees who made the company successful doing things the old way need to understand why the old way won’t work going forward. That’s a communication challenge as much as a strategy challenge. Some CEOs can make that translation. Others can’t, no matter how capable they are operationally. 

What Boards Want but Can’t Always Articulate

In nearly every CEO search we run now, boards want someone who understands both the legacy business and the platform future. They want industry knowledge and cross-industry perspective. They want operational credibility and technology vision. They want someone who can reassure existing stakeholders while preparing the organization for a business model that doesn’t exist yet. 

That profile is hard to fill because it rarely exists in one person. So, boards face a choice: hire the operator who knows the business cold but struggles with the platform vision, or hire the platform thinker who understands ecosystem economics but lacks industry credibility. 

We’ve seen both approaches work. We’ve also seen both fail. The ones who succeed share something specific: they can tell a story about why the company needs to change that makes sense to people who built their careers in the old model. They don’t dismiss operational excellence. They frame it as table stakes. They explain that what got the company here won’t get it to the next level. And they do it without alienating the people who made the current success possible. That ability to hold two ideas simultaneously—respect for what worked before and clarity about what must change—separates successful transitions from failed ones. 

CEO Search for Hospitality, Travel, and Leisure

If you’re a board evaluating CEO candidates, or if you’re a CEO trying to figure out whether you can lead through this transition, here’s what matters: 

Can this person see the organization as one component in a larger customer journey rather than as the center of a value chain? Do they think about partnerships as strategic architecture or as vendor relationships? When they talk about technology investment, do they frame it as cost or as capability? Can they explain to someone who spent 30 years perfecting the current business model why that’s no longer sufficient? 

And the uncomfortable one: Are they comfortable not knowing the answer? Because nobody has figured out exactly what a hotel-as-data-platform or an airline-as-ecosystem-orchestrator looks like at scale. The playbook doesn’t exist. The CEO who needs certainty before moving will get left behind. The CEO who can make directionally correct bets with incomplete information has a chance. 

We’ve spent the last several years helping boards think through these questions. The answer isn’t always obvious. Sometimes the best CEO is the industry veteran who can adapt how they think about the business. Sometimes it’s the outsider who brings fresh perspective but needs to build credibility fast. What doesn’t work is pretending the job is the same as it was five years ago. 

The boundaries fell. The CEO job changed. Now we find out who can lead through it. 

About the Author

Toon Balm is a Partner at Stanton Chase Amsterdam, specializing in executive search across consumer products and services, with particular expertise in the travel, hospitality, and leisure sectors. Toon previously held strategic leadership roles at Air France KLM across Nigeria, Iran, Italy, China, and the Netherlands, where he was part of the KLM Management Group. In this capacity, he led commercial strategy, transformation initiatives, and regional operations, developing deep expertise in both traditional business models and the platform-era thinking now reshaping the sector. His unique background—combining aviation industry leadership, executive search expertise, and a tenure with the Special Forces Division of the Royal Dutch Army—positions him to identify leaders who can navigate the complex convergence of technology, operations, and customer experience.