99. Rebuilding Orient Express: Trains, Palazzi and the World’s Largest Sailing Yacht with Gilda Perez-Alvarado, Former CEO & Chief Strategy Officer, Accor

Gilda Perez-Alvarado spent nearly two decades at JLL, ultimately as Global CEO of its Hotels & Hospitality group, advising the sovereign wealth funds and private equity firms behind some of the world’s most significant hotels. She then crossed to the operator’s side at Accor, where she went on to lead Orient Express.

In this episode, Fred Moore sits down with Gilda to trace how a brand born in 1883 is being rebuilt as an ecosystem of trains, hotels and yachts. They get into why every property celebrates its own era while carrying Orient Express as its surname, and why the newest chapter is a sailing yacht with 54 suites built to be chartered whole.

They also discuss what LVMH brings to the partnership and a service culture where the crew have no backstage to retreat to. Gilda also tells the story of the original 1929 carriages, spotted on Google satellite imagery near the border between Poland and Belarus and brought back to France in convoy.