Tina Edmundson Runs the World’s Most Luxurious Hotels—By Embracing Discomfort
Some of us fantasize about travel like it’s our job. For Tina Edmundson, it literally is her job. As president of the Luxury Group by Marriott International, which has a portfolio of more than 545 hotels and resorts across 74 countries, her mission is to get inside the mind of the “global luxurian”—a discerning, modern traveler who steps into hotels with the highest of expectations. That could mean anything from decadent relaxation in an iconic travel destination to an unforgettable adventure in a road-less-traveled locale.
Edmundson actually grew up thinking she wanted to be a doctor, but the dynamic world of travel and hospitality seemed destined to draw her in. During her childhood in Mumbai, India, her parents worked for an airline, and she became a frequent flyer before she could walk. Later, her mom ran beauty salons out of hotels, where Edmundson soaked up the scene. When she was a teenager, she and her sister moved to London to attend hairstyling school. “My mom wanted to make sure that we had a backup plan, in case we didn’t find anything else to do for work,” says Edmundson, who promptly ensured she wouldn’t need that fallback plan, earning a finance degree from the University of Bombay, then moving to the U.S. to pursue her MBA in hotel and restaurant administration at the University of Houston. She’d planned to return to India upon graduation, until she had an appropriately travel-related meet-cute: She met her future husband, a Louisiana native, on a Southwest Airlines flight.
The first rungs on Edmundson’s career ladder included unglamorous hotel-operations jobs. But she approached each with grit, learning the business from the ground up, one guest at a time. After climbing to senior vice president of luxury operations at Starwood Hotels, she joined Marriott as a senior vice president in 2008, then made a name for herself as global brand officer during the 2016 Starwood-Marriott merger, which formed what is still the world’s largest hospitality company.
Today, she oversees Marriott International’s eight high-profile luxury hotel brands: The Ritz-Carlton, Ritz-Carlton Reserve, St. Regis Hotels & Resorts, Bvlgari Hotels & Resorts, EDITION, The Luxury Collection, W Hotels, and JW Marriott. After just a few years, she’s already made her mark, introducing Saks Fifth Avenue personal-shopping suites in select hotels, launching The Ritz-Carlton Yacht Collection, and developing properties such as the coveted St. Regis Estates.
