Big interview Great


With a ten-year career at IHG Hotels & Resorts, Phoebe Galbraith speaks to Joanna Kurowska, vice-president and managing director, UK and Ireland, to fi nd out how her time and experience in hospitality has shaped her as a hotelier as well as her expectations for the industry.


expectations “I


f it’s the right job for you, it’s the right area for you,” explains Joanna Kurowska. Discovering the joys of hospitality more than ten years ago, the vice-president and managing director, UK & Ireland, started in the heart of it all – a hotel. As director of a “beautiful resort in Croatia”, as Kurowska describes it, it never occurred to her that she could be doing anything different: “I loved being in the hotel, understanding how it is and what it is to be in a hotel.”


For her, that hotel felt like home for many years before the corporate life called her back, where she combined her financial experience with the hotel operational side in the UK and Germany, before she returned to the UK two years ago to drive hotel performance in the UK and Ireland hospitality market. “Whatever is happening in the UK and Ireland, at the end of the day, it’s on me to make sure that it is happening in the right way,” she says. “Anything from operating the existing hotels,


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Hotel Management International / www.hmi-online.com


IHG Hotels & Resorts


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