Belmond vice president Daniel Pasquali on selling luxury travel by living it first

When I join a Zoom call with Daniel Pasquali, he is sitting in his home in Austria, and I soon learn I’m quite lucky to catch him there and not jetting across the globe.

“I’m based in Austria, but being vice president of sales for Belmond, I would say 70 per cent of the time I’m travelling. I try to be very close to our guests, to our teams and the properties,” says Pasquali.

I shouldn’t be surprised. The luxury travel brand has 43 products across 24 countries, including hotels, trains, river cruises and safaris. And he tells me he has experienced all except one: Reid’s Palace, on Madeira.

“My family owns a hotel, but when I told my parents I wanted to study tourism management, they said, ‘No way, don’t do it,” – Daniel Pasquali on getting started in his career

Pasquali’s main goal is top-line revenue performance globally, which translates to getting heads on beds, so knowing each and every product intimately is incredibly important.

It turns out that Pasquali — who leads the Travel category of Attitude 101, supported by Booking.com, empowered by Bentley — was born into the tourist industry.

“My family owns a hotel, but when I told my parents I wanted to study tourism management, they said, ‘No way, don’t do it,’” remembers Pasquali. “And then my father said, ‘Daniel, you should pick law, economics or medicine.’ I went to my room and I did my very first PowerPoint, trying to visualise to my father why I wanted to study tourism management. My father was completely impressed that this funny Daniel can do a PowerPoint, and he allowed me to study tourism management in Switzerland.”

After receiving his master’s degree, Pasquali went on to work for the likes of W Hotels, Starwood Hotels and Marriott International, before being scooped up by Belmond in 2018. The company offered him a sales and marketing job, with a brief to work on the opening of two Belmond properties in the Caribbean. He admits he had no idea where Saint Martin and Anguilla were at the time, but relished finding those beautiful little dots on the map.

“When I started at Belmond, my welcome notes were to Mr and Mrs Pasquali. So, that changed to Mr and Mr Pasquali very, very fast” – Pasquali on

With both properties in the Caribbean closed for refurbishment in readiness for their launch, Pasquali was sent to Peru for his first Belmond experience. With six properties and two trains, it’s one of the company’s most densely covered regions — and regardless of how well travelled you are, a trip to the world wonder of Machu Picchu on the company’s tab is a very good day’s work. More importantly, Pasquali tells me that afterwards he truly understood what it means to be a Belmond guest. But while the Peru adventure sounds like a magical start to a new job, it wasn’t without its bumps in the road.

“When I started at Belmond, my welcome notes were to Mr and Mrs Pasquali. So, that changed to Mr and Mr Pasquali very, very fast,” he explains.

Although Belmond evidently had some lessons to learn about guest diversity, the luxury brand willingly took itself to school. 

“We are not greenwashing in this space and we never want to,” says Pasquali. “We were the first hospitality company that introduced an LGBTQ+ advisory board more than 10 years ago. In 2015, this board helped us to navigate through all the different angles of things that we should be doing right.” 

Its members are made up of external advisors from industries outside hospitality, ranging from publishing and the media to marketing and travel companies. Essentially, it includes people who might be Belmond guests and who could therefore provide a genuine reaction to its offering. In fact, the publisher of this very magazine is a board member and has helped shape the guest experience for the better.

---

The full feature and Attitude 101 list appears in issue 369 of Attitude magazine, available to buy now in print, on the Attitude app, or through Apple News+.