Our annual general meeting has been cancelled two years in a row – it was due to happen in 2020 and 2021, and could not go ahead because of the pandemic. However, it finally went ahead on 18–20 March 2022, in Lugano, Switzerland, with the theme: ‘It’s all about passion’. There were plenty of important speakers letting us know how they live their passion and how they implement passion in their own company.

We also had a panel of four very important executives: the chief executive of Dorchester collection, Christopher Cowdery; Roland Fasel, AMAN resort’s chief operating officer; Andrea Guerra, who is the chief mobility chief executive of Belmont, Shepard Blanc, and Bulgari hotels – part of LVMH Hotel Management; and then we had the president of Leading Hotels of the World, Shannon Knapp.

We had plenty of information to share and have consistently maintained the number of delegates in spite of this crisis. We have created a series of practical and formative initiatives in order to maintain contact with our delegates and make sure that during this period – in which quite a few hotels have closed or worked with a very limited level of occupancy – they could take advantage of seminars and courses organised by Cornell University and the University of Arizona. We also wrote a letter to the presidents of the European Commission, European parliaments and to the prime ministers of all European countries, to stimulate them to help the hotel industry during this difficult period.

So, these were all activities that we carried out during the closure. We also launched a lot of initiatives and many of our members attended to support the local community and help people in need. We did take care of quite a few people in certain cities, and some hotels helped hospitals as well – we lodged doctors and the medical staff so they could support the sick people in their own hospitals, for example.

New obstacles ahead

We started 2022 with a good outlook. As the business was coming back, we started to see a lot of bookings, particularly from March/April onward. So, we were hoping business would come back – maybe not at the level of 2019, but definitely at a significant level. Unfortunately, with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, this has created another difficult moment for the hospitality industry. Now, besides the fact that all the countries bordering Russia, including Ukraine, are unlikely to travel, people are also not travelling from China.

However, we want to stay optimistic. We are investing in promotions and activities to get clients to visit our countries. But it is definitely a peculiar time at the moment, and it’s difficult to know how this war will unfold and how much damage it will cause to the European community. So, I believe that the expectation of bringing business back will not take place for now, but hopefully it will come back for the second half of the year.

This is EHMA’s priority – to have business come back. So, we are keen to stimulate all our members to be positive and passionate about their work. We want to stay close to our people as many of them suffered enormously over the past two years. One of the meetings we had during the EHMA AGM was also about taking care of the people that have suffered enormously during this time.

We really want to take care of our people and be close to every hotelier to make sure that every hotel will reopen and work at full speed.