Rui Reis

Former Divisional Managing Director for North, Central America and the Caribbean, Belmond Hospitality

Rui Reis is a hospitality leader with over 30 years of experience managing luxury hotels and resorts across the Americas, Europe, and Polynesia. His work has consistently focused on how to deliver high-end guest experiences while maintaining a strong connection to place, community, and long-term stewardship.

As Divisional Managing Director at Belmond for North, Central America, and the Caribbean, Rui oversaw a portfolio of distinctive properties including Cap Juluca, La Samanna, El Encanto, and Maroma. Across these properties, he emphasized operational excellence alongside a deeper integration of local context, from community engagement to cultural expression, ensuring that each hotel reflected its surroundings rather than operating apart from them.

Earlier in his career, Rui held senior operational roles at Starwood Hotels & Resorts, where he led the opening and positioning of several flagship properties, including The St. Regis Istanbul, The St. Regis Mexico City, and The St. Regis Bora Bora. His work across these projects reinforced a core belief: that luxury is not defined only by product, but by how a hotel relates to its environment, its people, and the destination it inhabits.

Throughout his career, Rui has worked to evolve how luxury hospitality approaches responsibility. Rather than treating sustainability as an add-on, he has integrated it into daily operations,  from reducing environmental impact and rethinking food systems, to embedding local culture and partnerships into the guest experience. His approach reflects a practical understanding of tradeoffs, showing that high-performance luxury and responsible practices are not in conflict, but can reinforce each other when grounded in real operations.

At CRH, Rui brings an operator’s perspective on what it takes to implement responsible hospitality at scale within complex, high-expectation environments. His experience helps bridge ambition and execution, ensuring that responsibility is not just defined, but delivered in ways that are both credible and commercially viable.

Rui holds a Certificate in Hotel Real Estate Investments and Asset Management from Cornell University and is a graduate of the Escola de Hotelaria e Turismo do Porto.