About

Thanks for visiting us.

My hospitality education began on the French Riviera in Juan-les-Pins—working in a boutique hotel restaurant and as water skiing instructor at the town’s most exclusive private beach, where the sport was said to have been invented. Serving ultra-high-net-worth international guests taught me early lessons in personalized luxury service.

Those lessons deepened over 27 years across Asia.

During seven years in Hong Kong, I provided technology services to the Peninsula Hotel Group—consistently rated the world’s best hotel—while simultaneously serving on the guest-facing management team for the city’s most exclusive nightclub operation, catering to international celebrities and Hong Kong’s film industry elite. These contrasting contexts—corporate hospitality excellence and sophisticated evening entertainment—taught me the psychology of anticipation, discretion, and creating exceptional experiences for the world’s most demanding guests.

Seventeen years in Thailand followed, where I worked with multiple luxury hotels and exclusive golf course resorts, including Blue Canyon Country Club in Phuket. Deploying technology systems meant understanding operations intimately: how properties anticipate needs, train staff, and maintain the standards that distinguish true excellence.

But professional service was only part of the immersion. I learned Thai fluently and married into Thai culture. Lived in Kyoto learning Japanese and observing Omotenashi principles firsthand. Navigated Hong Kong business and daily life in Cantonese. Over 27 years across ten countries, speaking five languages, this wasn’t expatriate observation—it was genuine cultural integration.

This course emerges from that unique vantage point: someone who worked in European luxury hospitality, managed guest experiences at the highest levels in Asia, and lived deeply in both Eastern and Western service traditions. The frameworks translate decades of cross-cultural pattern recognition into practical tools that respect your existing expertise while offering the fresh perspectives that refine professional practice.

This approach has been validated in both Eastern and Western hospitality contexts. I was invited by a leading Japanese hotel chain to develop training materials for their new London opening—recognition that my interpretation of Omotenashi principles resonates with the culture that created them. I have also presented on applying Japanese hospitality principles to customer experience at Google Headquarters in London, to an audience of restaurant marketers and customer experience innovators.

Now based in the UK, I created Omotenashi.me to share these insights with five-star hospitality professionals seeking to add polish and psychological sophistication to their craft.

Back in Japan, I soon came across a word for this extraordinary hospitaity philosophy. They call it “Omotenashi”. And what is so impressive is the pride and self-esteem you see in everybody in their hospitality roles. So I decided to find out what really goes in to it. What makes it work so consistently. To share what it is and how it’s done.

I studied the underlying philosophy, the behaviours and the hospitality practices and have been sharing it for the past few years to a wide range of audiences.