Hello everyone -
July’s podcast episode is a very timely one for both the hospitality industry and travel enthusiasts. Orient Express has emerged in crescendo form — from the launch of its train, La Dolce Vita and its first hotel, La Minerva Rome, both in 2025, to the seemingly ubiquitous Orient Express Venezia and the impossible-to-ignore launch of The Corinthian yacht just a couple months ago. The revamped heritage brand has just begun trading, and yet well-heeled and savvy travelers already recognize the brand’s art deco codes and storytelling on multi-modal travel.
Last summer, I was introduced to Orient Express CEO Gilda Perez-Alvarado through one of my old bosses at Cain (shout out to Ellen!) and wanted to know how Accor, in partnership with LVMH, is planning to create a new niche within luxury travel. While we are seeing other brands building their own multi-modal travel universes, Orient Express is distinct in that it’s a trademark being repositioned and it’s establishing all three modes - hotels, yachts, trains - contemporaneously and through various partnership structures. The hotels and trains are structured as management agreements as per Accor’s asset-light model, while the yacht cruise business is capitalized in partnership with Swiss investor Millenium.
My conversation with Gilda is a rare look at a heritage brand being rebuilt as an operating business in real time, from the person running it.
I hope you enjoy the episode and as always, feel free to write to me with your thoughts.
Best
Nadine
Listen on Apple Podcasts
Part I: The Operating System for Culture with Marc Lotenberg, founder of Dorsia
Dorsia is building the operating system for private members’ clubs: a first-party, end-to-end technology platform designed to replace the legacy software and disconnected third-party integrations that most clubs still run on today. Marc Lotenberg, founder of Dorsia, argues that the gap between what the most discerning members expect and what the average club can actually deliver comes down to a failure of infrastructure, not hospitality intent.
In Part I of this episode, Marc makes the case for why genuine personalization at the club level has to be built on first-party data sovereignty, what it actually costs to build compliant, frictionless hospitality technology at scale, and why he believes that pretending every prospective member is your customer is the fastest way to end up with none.
Thank you Dorsia for making this episode possible.
To learn more about Dorsia’s hospitality tech, get in touch: melissa@dorsia.com
Download Dorsia to get access to impossible tables and events here (code: THESTANZA)
Follow Dorsia on Instagram here
Part II: Heritage at Scale: Building the Orient Express Universe Across Trains, Yachts, and Hotels with Gilda Perez-Alvarado, CEO Orient Express
Episode starts at 13:26
Gilda Perez-Alvarado is CEO of Orient Express and Chief Strategy Officer at Accor, where she oversees the brand’s expansion across hotels, luxury trains, and yachts. Orient Express operates as a strategic joint venture between Accor and LVMH, combining Accor’s decades of global hospitality infrastructure with LVMH’s expertise in luxury consumer goods and brand stewardship. Gilda joined Accor in late 2023 after two decades at JLL Hotels & Hospitality Group, where she rose to Global CEO of the practice, advising owners and investors on hospitality transactions across real estate and capital markets worldwide.
Today, Orient Express spans two open hotels in Rome and Venice, the La Dolce Vita luxury train operating on Italy’s historic tourist rail network, a second train, L’Orient Express set for 2027, and the Corinthian yacht that launched in May 2026, with the Olympian to follow in 2027. Every asset is designed to be privatizable, capped in room count to protect scarcity, and sourced through a combination of third-party owner relationships and direct joint venture capital. The Italian portfolio is developed in partnership with Arsenale, who first approached Accor ahead of the pandemic with a proposal to flag the La Dolce Vita train as Orient Express.
Orient Express is ultimately building what Gilda describes as a multi-modal travel business, designing itineraries that sequence hotels, trains, and yachts into a single continuous guest journey rather than a collection of standalone bookings.
In this episode, Nadine sits down with Gilda to explore what it really takes to relaunch one of the world’s most recognized travel brands spanning real estate, rail, and maritime operations, while satisfying the competing demands of two publicly-oriented parent companies and a long-term brand mandate that has to hold for at least another century.
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
How the Accor-LVMH joint venture divides responsibility, and what each parent company brings to the table beyond equity
The investment logic of the Arsenale partnership, and how its approach to luxury train inventory shaped the Italian portfolio’s hotel and rail strategy
The site selection framework Orient Express applies to new hotel assets, including the role of an in-house historian
Why Orient Express capped its hotel room counts and built every asset to be privatizable, and how that constraint shapes owner conversations and pricing strategy
Gilda’s view on how distribution and guest acquisition has evolved beyond traditional means
The open question on the Corinthian yacht’s revenue model: whether Orient Express becomes primarily a transient product or a private charter business, and what the early demand signals suggest
How Orient Express is approaching guest curation on trains and yachts, and why Gilda frames it as one of the most consequential and least controllable variables in the business
The tension between short-term shareholder reporting obligations as part of a publicly traded parent and a brand mandate framed explicitly around a 143-year time horizon
What Gilda learned from LVMH’s approach to scarcity and brand stewardship, and how she is applying that framework to a hospitality product that did not previously operate at this price point
Learn more about Orient Express here
Follow Orient Express on Instagram
