The Developer's Playbook: Building a €3B European Lifestyle & Luxury Hotel Portfolio with David Zisser

Part I: The Architecture of the Guest Experience

La Bottega Collective designs and produces the physical and sensory touchpoints of the luxury hotel stay, from bathroom formulations and textiles to amenities, gifting, and retail, working with 15,000 properties across 117 countries, from the world's most recognized hotel groups such as Aman and Four Seasons, to the finest independent properties such as Passalacqua and Il San Pietro di Positano. Tommaso Pacini, CEO of La Bottega Collective, argues that the guest experience is not a collection of amenities but a coherent sensory language, and that the hotels who understand this are the ones building something guests cannot find, replicate, or buy anywhere else.

In Part I of this episode, Tommaso walks through how La Bottega Collective reads a property before designing a single touchpoint, why the choice between licensed and fully custom product programs is ultimately a question of time and conviction rather than budget, and how the most effective guest experience artifacts extend the emotional memory of a stay well beyond checkout.

Thank you La Bottega Collective for making this episode possible.

Learn more and get in touch with La Bottega Collective ⁠here⁠.

Follow La Bottega Collective on Instagram ⁠here⁠.

Part II: The Developer's Playbook: Building a €3B European Lifestyle & Luxury Hotel Portfolio with David Zisser

Episode starts at (17:22)

David Zisser is the founder of Omnam, a €3 billion European hotel development and investment platform with a portfolio concentrated in lifestyle and luxury assets across Italy and key European markets. His recent projects include the Edition Lake Como, W Rome, which he credits with catalyzing what W Hotels internally called its 2.0 positioning, and the Hotel Bauer Venice, acquired out of a bankruptcy process in partnership with Mohari Hospitality and flagged with Rosewood. He is currently developing a proprietary hotel brand, with a Paris property featuring Pharrell Williams as creative director serving as its first expression.

Omnam operates across the full development stack, from site identification and capital structuring through to brand selection, design intent, and operational oversight. Omnam’s LPs include institutional investor Bain Capital, and Mohari Hospitality, with whom David has built a partnership centered on a shared conviction about where luxury hospitality is heading. Omnam has worked with several major third party operators, and that breadth of exposure now informs both its underwriting discipline and its decision to build its own brand from a position of genuine industry knowledge rather than ego.

In this episode, Nadine sits down with David to explore what it really takes to build a multi-billion euro development platform in luxury hospitality, from navigating fundraising from institutional capital and large family offices to acquiring one of Venice's most storied hotels out of bankruptcy.

INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS

• David's deal framework, and why any project where success is contingent on factors outside Omnam's control is a pass

• How the Hotel Bauer acquisition came together out of a bankruptcy process, with competing global bidders, layered political dynamics, and a timeline that tested everyone involved

• Ultra-luxury brand dilution and which operators are most exposed as generational wealth transfer accelerates

• David's view on ADR stabilization, total in-hotel spend capture, and why the P&L conversation that matters most is not the one most investors are having

• Why David believes hotel operators should exit F&B operations, and what a properly aligned fee structure looks like from an owner's perspective

• The tension at the center of building a scalable brand from a singular, heritage-driven flagship asset

• What David learned from managing institutional capital

Learn more about Omnam’s portfolio ⁠here⁠.

Follow Omnam on Instagram ⁠here⁠.