Stuart Greif: The Forbes Luxury Power Player

In the realm of global travel and hospitality, few executives can boast a background as diverse and deep-seated as Stuart Greif. Born and raised in New Jersey, he grew up within arm's reach of the pulsating life of New York City and Philadelphia, in a family where hospitality wasn't just a word, but a value system. A transformative summer scholarship to Osaka, Japan, in his early teens was his first taste of a culture steeped in the spirit of Omotenashi, the Japanese concept of wholehearted hospitality, a concept that resonated deeply with him.

This early exposure to international perspectives ignited a lifelong passion for exploration. His adventures in his early twenties, including a stint in consulting and living in a hotel in midtown Manhattan, deepened his love for the hospitality industry. His experiences in the bustling hotel, where the staff became his family, revealed a sector brimming with passionate individuals dedicated to delivering kindness.

An MBA degree later, his journey led him to the helm of a global travel practice for J.D. Power. From there, he blazed a trail through positions that included Senior Executive for Travel & Hospitality at Microsoft, and a key role at a unicorn start-up backed by early investors in Amazon, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Today, he is Executive Vice President, Chief Strategy, Innovation & Operating Officer at Forbes Travel Guide. His career is marked by a passionate commitment to connecting people, ideas, and opportunities.

Stuart is an ardent advocate for diversity, equity, and inclusion, championing women and traditionally underrepresented founders. His belief in the power of community and service, and his commitment to advancing innovation and elevating the industry for all stakeholders, paint the portrait of an executive who sees the big picture and strives to create a positive impact at every turn.

On a personal note, his love for travel extends beyond the professional realm. A language immersion program prior to his junior year abroad led him to the woman who would, 24 years later, become his wife. Now living north of San Francisco with their two boys, he credits travel for providing the greatest sources of happiness in his life, both personally and professionally.

This journey, etched with an intimate understanding of the spirit of hospitality and a global perspective, offers a unique lens into the world of travel and hospitality — a testament to the power of exploration, human connection, and kindness.

Stuart, what do you see as the biggest challenges facing the travel and hospitality industry in the next 5 years? How do you think these challenges can be addressed?

There’s a generation of companies that are taking a fundamentally new approach – for example, the Social Commerce space. People of all generations are turning to social media first over Google to decide where they want to eat, shop, travel, what products to buy, what hotels to stay at and more. And that was before ChatGPT, which will be transformational.When you’re receiving 4-5 personalized results for your search from ChatGPT type capabilities versus traditional search results, the question is where does your business rank and appear in what comes back, if at all?

ChatGPT has the potential to flatten much of the market like a pancake if you’re not providing unique, differentiated value or some other moat/sustainable advantage. I wrote about this and the top 5 strategic questions that ChatGPT poses that you can read about here.

How do you ensure that technology platforms and customer experience work together seamlessly in the travel and hospitality industry? Can you give an example of a successful implementation of this approach?

During the pandemic, the entire industry pulled forward years of innovation in a compressed time–messaging with guests, contactless check-in, digital ways to connect remotely via Zoom and Teams which has changed the nature of work and life for job types not requiring on-site work.

What I see is that now is a unique time where the advance in technology, lowering of costs and barriers to scale and the ability to disrupt the status quo makes this the best opportunity over the past decade to build and create a better industry for everyone – for both start-ups and legacy players if they have the vision and intestinal fortitude to disrupt themselves.

As a mentor and advocate for female, DE&I and traditionally underrepresented founders, what steps do you believe the industry should be taking to increase diversity and inclusivity?

Men need to actively serve as advocates and allies to accelerate and make change happen. That means championing career opportunities, promotions, compensation, recognition, mentoring, coaching, and especially when women and DE&I colleagues are not (yet) at the proverbial table or part of a given conversation. It means making changes to the environment so that it is inclusive of the needs of everyone, not the subset of us that historically defined work and work culture that advantages us in ways we often aren’t even aware.  

It also means ensuring there is an equal time and voice across the board – actively ensuring all voices, not just the most vocal or male ones are heard. I am proud that at the executive level of Forbes Travel Guide, the management team is over 50% women and even greater below the SVP level. I am also proud that I identified, advocated, and successfully made the case for promotions, salary increases, and recognition for women and DE&I colleagues at all levels of our organization. You have to use your voice to push for change.

You have a long track record of driving profitable growth and scale. Can you share a specific example of how you achieved this in a previous role?

When I led Global Travel & Hospitality at JD Power, which focused on the Voice of the Customer and independently providing ratings based on actual customer experiences, we didn’t have a big budget for marketing and advertising. We also shared our results in a very straightforward, market-research-y way. There was no story, no context, no adapting and relating to what’s going on in the industry and how different media outlets and consumers would value different angles on the story.  

So I developed the story on how our results related to what was topical in the industry and markets, why it matters in the ways those audiences cared about the most, and landed recurring spots on CNBC Squawk on the Street, interviews with all the major media outlets that mattered in key markets and I went from us having very little coverage to spending the better part of 48 hours doing back-to-back interviews as part of a study release.

I also asked myself who has the biggest reach within industry and for hotels, for example, it was Smith Travel Research (STR’s) Hotel News Now (HNN) and Cornell’s Hospitality School. With STR’s HNN, I reached out to offer unique insights and data for articles based on what we had that no one else did – that led to them inviting me to be a guest columnist for them.

Likewise, I engaged with Cornell. We exchanged our historical data for their platform of 90,000 strong industry followers and subscribers.

All together, it increased our media exposure through the roof, raised our brand profile, positioned us prominently, reached a greater audience than we ever could and played a contributing role in marketing and sales effort that enabled me to drive record revenue and profit growth.  We were getting more inbound requests as a result than ever before and we were doing so with little incremental time, money or need to create something 'new.'

Kind Traveler has a mission to empower travelers to make a positive impact on individuals, animals, and the environment in communities around the world. Can you describe how the travel and hospitality industry can be a force for good in the world?

Kind Traveler enables sustainable hotels to choose a cause that has an impact locally and provide benefits to unique guests who provide a $10 donation (or more) with 100% of the money going to the cause, and they partner with DMOs to do this at scale.

More models like this are needed where there are direct, measurable impacts combined with innovation around better ways to not greenwash, but actually demonstrate real, tangible offsets are being made – while also recognizing there are bigger, industry-wide innovations that need to help sustainable and responsible tourism. For example, sustainable aviation fuels, which are bigger, more ambitious, long-term imperative for industry and governments to champion.

At Forbes Travel Guide, we’re doing our part launching a Responsible Hospitality initiative with ahighly respected Responsible and Sustainable Tourism expert, Herve Houdre. I am also serving on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council for Sustainable Tourism where these themes are front and center.

You are a sought-after industry expert and speaker – was this career a path you always wanted to take? Or did it happen by chance?

When an opportunity presents itself you have to decide to go for it sometimes and be all in. My wife and I tell our kids no one learns to ride a bike the first time without falling off, scraping their legs, and having some pain. Life is like that. Careers are like that.

I think having a positive, can-do, growth mindset is something I had to teach myself over years.

Don’t try to live the next 10 years in the next 10 days. Success most often is not instant – it’s from the accumulation of life’s experiences, work and personal, over time and learning. When you’re stretching you’re learning, and muscle is built by resistance. If you’re not a bit uncomfortable and feeling challenged at times, you’re not really going to grow. You have to learn to become comfortable and get used to being uncomfortable.

You have experience working in various areas of the travel and hospitality industry. Can you discuss any trends or developments in the industry that you find particularly exciting or promising for the future?

Social Commerce is already having a profound effect on where customers go to seek information, inspiration and transact. You have to go where your customers are going to be culturally relevant and where and how they want to transact. At Forbes Travel Guide, we have a deep partnership with Jerne, which is a platform that vets travel influencers and quantifies their audience in detail on one side and makes it turnkey for a travel provider to execute a campaign with the right influencer just as easily as executing any other kind of marketing tech campaign.

Ten years from now we'll look back and see influencers become codified as another marketing and distribution channel at scale.

ChatGPT also represents one of the biggest productivity opportunities. My wife has been using ChatGPT for Instagram posts for the high-end wine business where she works, saving her 15-20 minutes of research and drafting editorial copy a day as another example. Having your bot (e.g. ChatGPT) simply authorized to pay your hotel with whatever payment method you tell it to do should be that simple.

Finally, Stuart, what has your experience been like working at Forbes Travel Guide?  

My first day was less than a month before the world shut down due to Covid! Going through Covid was the most challenging period in our industry I have experienced in all my years and we stood by our clients, launched digital services, provided free services to keep them engaged, motivated and inspired through the downturn – from our Hospitality Stronger series sharing learning and development insights that had over 75,000 views by professionals globally, while having fun and keeping things entertaining.

We stood by our clients, provided flexibility and as a result, they stood by us. We retained and have since materially grown our client base as a result. You have to honor the core of what creates the foundational anchor and strategic differentiation for your business while being willing to innovate and reinvent yourself with new products and services that take you in new directions. Our business is growing because our Chairman, CEOs (Hermann Elger and Filip Boyen), Board, leadership team and all our colleagues never lost sight or abandoned those principles while taking risks, experimenting and trying new things. You have to adapt and adjust while staying true to who you are and your reason for being.

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Images courtesy of: Stuart Greif, Forbes Travel Guide, and Oleg Magni