42. Kamal Fakhoury, Chief Executive Officer, Cristal Group
Kamal Fakhoury is set to continue with the ambitions and vision of previous CEO, Peter Blackburn
Despite joining the company nine years ago, Fakhoury is a newcomer to his current role, due to the unfortunate demise of the previous Cristal Group and Cristal Hotels & Resorts CEO Peter Blackburn in July this year. At the time, he was COO, and told Hotelier: “The Cristal Family deeply regrets the loss of our founding father Peter Blackburn. Unfortunately the Middle East hospitality industry lost one of its icons.”
Fakhoury’s vision for the future echoes the ambitions of Blackburn, with a target of 50 new hotels by 2020. In the Middle East in the last year, Cristal Group opened Cedar Ville by Emerald in Erbil and Bayat Hotel by Cristal in KSA.
Commenting on notable improvements to systems and operations since taking office, Fakoury says: he is “always trying to improve on our designs and operations through new ideas and empowerment of my team”.
Fakhoury’s other key accomplishments include co-founding a management company in 2007 which operated hotels successfully during the financial downturn.
By the numbers
1 Number of months in the role
9 Number of years with company
3 Number of Middle East operating hotels
7 Number of Middle East pipeline hotels
| Advertisement |
Search our database of more than 2,700 industry companies
