Why Luxury Travel and Hospitality?

As I looked back in 2023 at my personal and professional future, the options were seemingly limitless. It was exciting and daunting all at once. I’ve had a storied career in technology, focusing on digital transformation and how it impacts enterprises.

I’ve had the pleasure of being a part of the transformation of many of the world’s biggest brands: AmerisourceBergen (now Cencora), ExxonMobil, and Comcast. I’ve also worked with many other brands that perhaps aren’t as well known. Nevertheless, these experiences all had one thing in common: dynamic, great people, both on the client side and on the partner side, dedicated to doing great things.

The Foundation

My favorite part of every engagement with my clients in the past was envisioning what was possible. The client knew their business, and I and my team knew technology. When combined, we were able to dream up visions and possibilities that neither of us could have imagined without the power of collaboration. It became clear to me as I sat thinking about what I wanted my newly-established consultancy to be like. It should be filled with moments like those combined with the mission to make those visions come true.

Leveraging my understanding of business merged with my deep experience in data and technology transformation, I established Sherpera Consulting as a company focused on helping our clients see the opportunities in creating a transformation roadmap of dedicated initiatives to realize value in their technology investments (rather than buying more and more tech) and then overseeing those initiatives to ensure that they deliver on the vision set out in the beginning. This business proposition, frankly, really jazzed me up.

That’s Huge!!

And the world is Sherpera Consulting’s oyster. After 20 years in the technology industry working with some of the biggest brands, save a few exceptions like Amazon and Walmart, every company on the planet suffers from the following immutable truth:

Every company has too much technology that is not delivering the expected ROI

The total addressable market is huge. Measured in billions and billions of dollars in opportunity. To the uninitiated, this might seem awesome, but I’m certain you know the problem. If you try to be everything to everyone, you end up being nothing to anyone. I needed to do some soul-searching about who we wanted to work with. I’ve had so much broad experience across so many companies. SMBs and mid-market to Fortune 50 companies across industries, including a 7-year stint working very closely with the great people at AmerisourceBergen (ranked Fortune 11). I had a lot of experience to tap into.

Why Luxury Travel and Hospitality?

As I was contemplating these things, I sat down and outlined criteria for what we wanted out of the work we did at Sherpera. The list below reflects what we were looking for:

We had to feel passionate about the work
Our expertise and experience need to be transformative to the customer
It needs to be rewarding
It needs to be fun

Number one is pretty easy. It is at the core of what we do. In my past life, we sat across the table and provided clients with engineering services. Now, Sherpera Consulting sits on the client’s side of the table, overseeing and ensuring that the initiatives deliver the targeted value and get done right. It’s like having a world-class architect and building inspector oversee your new-home build, making sure everything get’s done correctly. Clients love this. So do we.

When looking at the second objective, being transformative to the customer in our work related to the luxury travel and hospitality industries, it is clear that it is a technically underserved market. There is a lack of modern and open architecture in the travel and hospitality tech industry that hinders them from providing the experience their customers are accustomed to and creates vendor lock-in. Bringing modern approaches, platforms, and architecture is, without a doubt, transformative for travel companies and their customers.

In consideration of it being rewarding in the past, sometimes it was hard to see the impact and reward to the client of the work we did. Huge enterprise impact is hard to measure and sometimes takes years to realize. I love the fact that families or small groups frequently own and run these businesses in the luxury travel and hospitality sectors, because they are frequently directly involved in and impacted by the work we do. Sherpera’s work has had a measurable direct impact on the people we get to work with. When we help them generate growing revenue, optimize a process, or create better customer experiences, it often has a significant and direct impact on those we’re working with. That is rewarding.

Now let’s talk about fun. In my prior work, thinking about the people I’ve worked with, my clients and colleagues were among the most fabulous people you could meet. I was never short on having fun. But… I never considered pharma, insurance, finance, manufacturing, consumer goods, etc . . . . . fun. The people were great fun; the industries, the products, and the services—not so much. Luxury travel and hospitality, on the other hand, I found fun and intriguing. Aligning digital with something people immensely enjoy doing has proven to be fun. Helping these great brands create better experiences for their guests is fun. Seeing the joy the guests experience through the work we’ve done is fun. And loads of it. We’ve definitely been having fun. I won’t lie, making on-site client visits to meet about our work together is generally nicer at a luxury resort than for a pharmaceutical company in a corporate park. Just sayin’

What’s Next?

Now that I’ve laid out in this inaugural issue of the Luxe Élevé the reasons why I’ll be focusing all my energy on verticalization within the luxury travel and hospitality space, let me share what to expect going forward. This newsletter and pretty much everything that I will be focusing on will be to become a resource to those within the luxury travel and hospitality industries regarding technology and digital transformation. I will work to share all that I’ve learned over the past 25+ years in transformation focused on these industries and the great people that work so hard to make the world a more enjoyable and luxurious place through the experiences they deliver.