Rebecca Masri
The founder of private members’ luxury hotel club, Little Emperors talks to Lysanne Currie about tech, trends and the future of travel.
“I'm not a tech person,” grins Rebecca Masri MBE. “I can't even connect my sky remote to my TV!” Which is ironic, as Masri is the brain behind Little Emperors, the private members’ luxury hotel club which offers members affordable luxury, by using cutting-edge, personalised technology to match clients with destinations. Today, it boasts some 35,000 members, who can take their pick of 4,000 of 5-star luxury hotels around the world. Little Emperors in-house team of travel experts and luxury advisors offer unparalleled preferred rates and guaranteed benefits, while assuring the lowest rates available to members. Masri’s come a long way from her days as a wealth manager at Goldman Sachs.
“I never actually intended to leave,” she says, of her previous life in global investment banking. It seems that having caught glandular fever, during the 2008 recession, and while on sick leave, she noticed a lot of friends had been leaving larger banks and setting up their own SMEs. She decided to join them. With a friend, Elizabeth, she set up a membership travel club, “that was really initially just for fun… we ended up charging a subscription fee to access the rates. As time went on, it took off and became a business and then I left my day job.”
It was good timing: “When the market tumbled in 2008, people who’d worked in finance lost their right to stay in luxury hotels. So there was already a gap that was growing in the market.” And Little Emperors was ready to fill it. She recalls being annoyed by her first membership signee, as it was a friend who’d had apartments in Paris and London and Tel Aviv. “I remember being really angry with him, saying he shouldn't have bought his membership because he was never going to use it, having access to apartments everywhere. But he said that he really wanted to support me.” Soon, Emperors “grew really quickly in a market of people who were looking for value”.
Though categorised as a concierge, Masri says Little Emperors should really be categorised as a tech company. “We're purely booking hotel rooms, and the service you receive from us is personalised – but through technology. We've really invested a lot of time and energy into the tech side of the business, which has allowed us to automate and grow quickly, using automation through technology to incorporate and gain more and more members without having to grow my team at the rate that a typical concierge would have to grow.”
Not being a born coder, she’d ended up “doing a course on basic coding in the evening, not because I wanted to be a coder, but I just wanted to understand what language they were speaking, especially if we were about to invest a lot of money into technology… I found a company who were able to build a basic technology platform for us and brought in a CTO to oversee what's going on.”
Little Emperors’ tech allows it to track people’s search and booking history – “But only in order to make tactical suggestions for you in the future. If you for example, have a dog, and you've requested a dog-friendly hotel in the past, we may suggest if there's a new English country hotel, which is dog friendly. We’re using very sophisticated, tactical technology.”
They’re currently looking to build a sales team: “Now that we can scale, we've never been confident in scaling with our tech until this moment where we can take on thousands, or tens of thousands of members, and actually manage them through our technology.
The other big culture shock for Masri was “suddenly being put in the position of being someone's boss: I was always junior at Goldman. I was surrounded by geniuses, and suddenly Little Emperors was hiring. I went from asking questions to having to answer them. The shift from corporate to running your own business is predominantly to do with managing people.” Little Emperors’ team is currently 47 people, with a London office of about 15 employees.
Among the management is Masri’s sister Charlotte, who looks after the hotel partnerships and was invited to join when Elizabeth left the business. “She's eight years younger than me. And when she left uni, she literally assumed that she would just work with me.” But Masri wasn’t letting her in that easily: “I'd had almost 10 years in the City. I knew what it was like to really work hard. And she didn't. So I challenged her to work for one year for different companies to understand what it was like to be part of a team. And she found that really unreasonable, but agreed!” Masri has nothing but praise for her, though: “She is a lot more patient than me, and we complement each other on so many levels. We're also very close as well.”
Though “very few people cancel their membership”, the Covid-19 pandemic obviously hasn’t passed the business by. “Bookings are down 50%, with fewer people are going away.” However, when they are holidaying, “they're staying for a really long time. Our average length of stay went from four or five nights to 14 nights. We have members in Dubai that have just extended for two months.” Masri reports that it’s young entrepreneurs and young families who tend to be among these vacationers. “Maybe because our members are slightly younger, they’re more akin to taking risks,” she says. “We’ve also had a lot of demand for new cool cities, places like Azerbaijan, and Georgia.” Yet for some, Covid-19 has also put a halt on the desire for adventure; others want to feel a sense of familiarity on holiday, “by returning to destinations where they feel safe and have fond memories”.
While there’s been an increase in Wellness Holidays, she also thinks 2021 will see a definite movement towards experiential travel too. “I think people want to actually do things and be free in their experiences. We'll start to see a trend in things like ranches in the US; things where you can actually experience different cultures, different food, different people, different nationalities and religions. And that will definitely, I think, be a precedent for our travel.”
Masri’s other passion is charity work: as a child, her younger brother was saved by St. Mary's Hospital. “When he came home happy and healthy, I felt compelled to give back.” It’s an urge she’s lived for ever since. “For a Jewish person, I’m not religious at all. But traditionally you give back to charity.” In 2010 she joined legacy lists for the London Olympics, fundraising towards a playground in Olympic Park. These days, much of her focus has been on “completely apolitical” Israeli-based charities: “I'm heavily involved in funding a school in the south of Israel, fundraising for health care for children. And I've also been involved with a lot of different hospitals in Israel as well. I think it's phenomenal the research that goes into their health care systems. I'm really proud to support the medical research.”
And the advice she’d give to anyone starting their own business? “Take risks,” she says. “I take risks every day.”