Rebecca Ruf

FOUNDER & CEO, Center for Responsible Hospitality

Rebecca Ruf is the Founder and CEO of the Center for Responsible Hospitality (CRH), where she leads the organization’s strategy, research, and industry engagement. A longtime hotel investor and owner, she brings an operator’s perspective to the question at the center of CRH’s work: how can hospitality better align what it values with how it actually operates. Her focus is on helping hotel owners and operators use real operational data to make better decisions, strengthen guest trust, and connect responsibility to long-term performance.

Rebecca brings over 25 years of experience across hospitality, finance, and global development. She began her career in hotel real estate and development at HVS International and Starwood Hotels, underwriting acquisitions and projects across multiple regions. That early exposure to how hotels are built, financed, and run, and the tradeoffs behind those decisions, continues to shape her approach today. As an investor and owner of independent, community-focused properties, she has remained closely connected to the realities of operations, where decisions are rarely straightforward and priorities must be constantly balanced.

She later moved into the nonprofit and financial sectors, leading data, research, and innovation initiatives at organizations including the Financial Alliance for Women and Women’s World Banking. Her work focused on turning complex data into practical tools that could influence real decisions, including the development of the Female Economy Analytics platform and partnerships with institutions such as the Gates Foundation, World Bank, IMF, and United Nations.

As she brought lessons from other sectors into hospitality, Rebecca saw a clear disconnect. Sustainability efforts often relied on checklists, certifications, and guest-facing messaging that did not reflect operational reality, while the most consequential issues , workforce conditions, community impact, and long-term place health, remained difficult to measure. Seeing both the scale of this gap and how far behind hospitality was, she founded CRH as a nonprofit built by the industry and for the industry to bring clarity, credibility, and practical tools to responsible hospitality.

Rebecca’s work focuses on making responsibility visible where it has historically been hidden: inside operations, supply chains, and everyday decisions. By grounding the conversation in real data and real tradeoffs, she is helping shift the industry toward a more practical, performance-based approach, one that reflects how hotels actually operate and what they contribute to the people and places around them.

Rebecca serves as Chair of the Board of Fundación Aliados, supporting indigenous farmers in the Amazon in transitioning to regenerative practices. She holds a Master’s degree in International Development and Economics from Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a Bachelor’s degree with distinction in Hospitality Administration from Cornell University.