The House of ESI: Forty-Eight Years of Searching for Leaders of Hospitality

A letter from Larissa Zwart

Rome, 20 March 2025

Dear friends of the House,

Some businesses measure themselves in quarters, others in decades. We have the quiet privilege of measuring ourselves in generations. This year, Executive Search International turns forty-eight. Forty-eight years of searching, quietly and carefully, for the men and women who carry the standards of luxury hospitality forward: the general managers, the hoteliers, the directors who understand that a hotel is not a product but a promise, kept daily, to each guest who crosses the threshold.

I am writing to you from our House at Piazza del Popolo in Rome. Outside the window, the obelisk of Ramses II stands where it has stood for two thousand years, and the light falls on the twin churches exactly as it did yesterday, and the day before. There is a lesson in this for those of us who work in hospitality: that the truly important things do not hurry, and that the truly important things do not change their mind.

A House built in three generations

ESI was founded in 1977 in the United States by Bernd Wosgien, a true pioneer, and a man who understood before most that hospitality is a profession, not a trade. Bernd was instrumental in the careers of many of the industry's most successful general managers and chief executives. He built ESI on three foundations: integrity, discretion, and the refusal to treat leadership as a commodity. Those three foundations remain, today, the floor on which we still stand.

In 1997, a young Italian hotelier named Stefano P. Biscioni was invited by Bernd to open an ESI office in Italy. Stefano had come from hotel operations; he knew the back-of-house as intimately as he knew the dining room. He understood that a general manager is not a résumé but a person, and that the difference between a good appointment and a great one is almost always a question of character. For more than twenty years, Stefano led ESI from Rome and London, placing leaders in many of the world's most distinguished hotels. He was, by every measure that matters, a gentleman and a true luxury hotelier. His sudden passing in May 2023 was a loss the industry is still absorbing.

I had the honour of beginning my own career in hospitality executive search with Stefano, at ESI Italy in Rome, between 2001 and 2004. He was my first teacher in this work. Much of what I do today, the patience, the preparation, the insistence that discretion is not optional, I learned from him.

Why we are reopening the House

In March 2025, together with Roberto De Zorzi, founder of Iniziative Venete Group and a respected name in Italian hospitality, I took over all the assets and activities of ESI, with the full endorsement of the Biscioni family. Paolo Biscioni, Stefano's father, wrote us a letter of support that I treasure, and that we have published on this website. Paolo's blessing was not a formality. It was the passing of a trust, from one generation to the next, and I take that trust very seriously.

When a House of this kind reopens its doors, there are two paths. One is to modernise in haste, to file away the old and to start again. The other is to continue, carefully, what has been built. To add where it is wise to add, to protect what must be protected, and to learn the craft anew from those who shaped it. We have chosen the second path. It is the slower path. It is also, I believe, the only honest one.

What you can expect from us

In the coming weeks and months, we will publish letters and reflections here. Sometimes from me, sometimes from the ESI editorial team, occasionally from colleagues and friends who have walked this road with us. These letters will cover what we see in the market, what we hear from owners and investors, and what we are learning about leadership in luxury hospitality in 2026 and beyond.

Our services remain what they have always been: discreet executive search for hotel groups, palaces and heritage properties; confidential career counsel for senior hospitality professionals; our proprietary CADT assessment for owners who wish to understand a candidate in depth before making a decision that will shape years of their business. You can read more about the firm here, and about the people who now carry it forward.

A quiet commitment

There is a phrase I carry with me, inherited from two cultures I am fortunate to live inside: Italian and Dutch. Echte gastvrijheid, van oudsher. True hospitality, from times past. It is a phrase I will return to in these letters, because it contains the essence of what we do. Luxury hotels are not made of marble and silk alone. They are made of leaders who know that the true hospitality factor is human intelligence: the quality of attention, the depth of knowledge, the courtesy that cannot be automated.

At ESI, we believe our work is to find those leaders, and to place them where they can flourish. That is what we did in 1977. That is what we did in 2001. That is what we are doing today, from our House at Piazza del Popolo. I am honoured to be here, and I am grateful to each of you, clients, candidates, friends of the House, who have trusted us with the most important appointments of a hotel's life.

More soon.

With hospitable regards,
Larissa Zwart
President, ESI Executive Search International