About this role
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Position Summary
The Openings Executive – EMEA drives hotel openings across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, ensuring each property launches with strong operational readiness, brand compliance, owner confidence, and commercial momentum. The role provides disciplined project leadership from pre-opening planning through post-opening stabilization, aligning ownership groups, hotel leadership, corporate functions, and brand teams around clear milestones, risks, and success measures. The ideal candidate is a commercially aware hospitality leader who can translate strategy into execution, resolve complexity with pace, and help deliver exceptional guest and team experiences from day one.
Key Responsibilities
This position centrally manages the openings process across all brands, with accountability for project governance, operational readiness, stakeholder alignment, launch quality, and measurable post-opening performance.
- Lead hotel opening projects from early planning through post-opening stabilization, ensuring clear governance, ownership, and escalation management.
- Develop and maintain detailed opening plans, critical path timelines, milestones, risks, dependencies, and deliverables.
- Coordinate ownership groups, hotel leadership, regional teams, and Hilton brand functions to align decisions, actions, and launch priorities.
- Ensure all hotel departments are prepared to operate effectively at launch, with readiness tracked against agreed pre-opening milestones.
- Support onboarding, training, system adoption, and operating rhythm creation for pre-opening teams.
- Align opening activities with Hilton brand standards, regional strategies, owner expectations, and hotel-level commercial priorities.
- Monitor post-opening performance indicators, including guest experience, operational stabilization, commercial ramp-up, and brand readiness outcomes.
- Provide targeted coaching, issue resolution, and operational support to hotel leadership teams during stabilization.
- Capture lessons learned and convert opening insights into repeatable process improvements that improve efficiency, scalability, and launch quality.
Support Activities
Contribute to regional KPIs through opening projects, including Hilton Honors enrolments, Stay Experience Score, and commercial ramp-up.
Maintain and enhance support materials, knowledge articles, tools, and processes to reflect the latest brand voice, improve adoption, and drive efficiency, scale, and quality.
Essential Qualifications and Experience
Bachelor’s degree in Hospitality, Business, or a related field, or equivalent professional experience.
Minimum five years of hotel operations experience, ideally including exposure to pre-opening or transitional environments.
Strong understanding of Hilton brand standards, hotel operating disciplines, and systems.
Excellent communication, organization, stakeholder management, problem-solving, and influencing skills.
Willingness and ability to travel across EMEA to support hotel openings and stakeholder engagement.
Preferred Qualifications and Skills
Multilingual capability, with English required and additional EMEA languages advantageous.
Project management certification or equivalent experience managing complex, cross-functional delivery plans.
Experience working across both managed and franchised hotel operating models.