Photography by Eric Laignel, Anthony Tahler, and renderings courtesy of Virgin Hotels
For Virgin Hotels CEO Raul Leal, the people he works with always come first. It’s a philosophy he’s embraced since his early days, when he worked alongside interior designer-turned-GM Mary Ellen St. John at the 45-acre Sheraton Royal Biscayne in Florida. During a two-year gut job of the early 20th-century-era property, Leal learned the ropes and received “an incredible [design] education,” he says. Now, “I’m so attuned to those details that I’m able to participate and provide relevant commentary on the design side,” the Cuban-born hotelier points out.
He’s honed that lesson with each job he’s held throughout his esteemed career. “People flourish in an environment where they know the leader has a certain amount of stability,” he explains. Since going to school for hotel business management, Leal has managed a number of restaurants and nightclubs, including the trendy Miami club Daphne’s—a passion that was evident early on as a teenager working at the Everglades Hotel Miami. “I used to see the GM come in every day, entertain, sign the tab, and I said, ‘I want that job.’”
He spent time as a GM at Interstate Hotels & Resorts, Lane Hotels, and Carnival Hotels before landing at Tecton Hospitality, where, inspired by Ian Schrager’s visionary work with boutique hotels, he launched Desires Hotels in 2002. “Boutique hotels are a bit more personal for a developer who does a Sheraton or a Marriott,” Leal says. “On some level, it resembles what either they want to be in life or what they aspire to.” During his tenure, he helped bring the Water Club in Puerto Rico to profitability—“it will always have a fond piece of my heart,” he says—and took on redoing Miami Beach’s only 5-Star property at the time, the Betsy Hotel, a project that wound up leading him to his next job.
After spending a night there, Virgin Group founder and philanthropist Richard Branson “was blown away by the Betsy,” Leal recalls, sparking talks of Leal joining the then-blossoming Virgin Hotels company. He thought, “if there’s one brand that can make a difference, this is it.” Starting as president in 2010 before ascending to CEO in 2012, Leal helped bring the first Virgin Hotel to fruition in Chicago three years later with the help of Rockwell Group Europe. “We didn’t want to be the next lifestyle hotel that is [only] a club and rooms. We wanted to have a point of view on the guest,” he explains. Taking a female-centric focus with an emphasis on comfort, guestrooms, dubbed chambers, feature a dressing area that is separated from the bedroom by a sliding door and beds with an extra corner bucket seat (so more people can work or lounge at once) with Virgin’s tongue-in-check ethos sprinkled throughout, including porcelain dogs that stand guard outside some guestroom doors.
With 12 hotels scheduled to open over the next two years, including San Francisco (debuting this fall), Dallas, Nashville, New York, the brand’s European debut in Edinburgh, Scotland, and the recently announced Las Vegas property (a renovation of the former Hard Rock), Leal and Virgin Hotels are set to establish a new breed of lifestyle hotels. “I am excited about the things we’re doing because we are pushing the envelope further,” he says. “We’re being ourselves, and I think that’s enough.”
