Gonzalo Ocejo Mateos

Gonzalo Ocejo is Vice President, Development for The Preferred Travel Group, and is in charge in develop all brands of the group: Preferred Hotels & Resorts, PHG Consulting, Historic Hotels Worldwide and Beyond Green. Gonzalo is based in Madrid, Spain but travels all the time throughout the world. He joined the company in November 2020 as a contractor and in April 2021 as a full-time employee.

Gonzalo is a Political Science/ International Relations Major from Universidad Complutense of Madrid and hold an MBA- Tourism from ICADE University. He dedicated a big part of my formative years into becoming fluent in both English and Japanese, living in both the USA and Japan as an exchange student during high school and college. Having both parents work as travel agents, he developed a passion for travel very early and did many work gigs in the travel industry while he was a student, working as a tour guide in Spain and organizing incentives for pharmaceutical companies in the US, Puerto Rico, UK, and Spain.

His first full-time job after college was for Hyatt Regency Chicago as a concierge and intern. His first executive job was Director of International Sales for a Spain-based small chain called Rafaelhoteles and started working for LUXE Worldwide Hotels in 2006, holding several positions in Sales (conducting sales in almost every European country), and mostly Business Development, negotiating and signing dozens of contracts with hotels in Spain, the USA, Japan, Italy, France, Turkey, Belgium, Czech Republic, Colombia, UK, Ireland, Hungary, Germany etc. He is also a part-time university professor since 2011, currently conducting hotel class to undergraduate students at IE Universit. In past years, Gonzalo has hosted travel programs in both radio and TV, and taught tourism in Universidad Antonio de Nebrija.

Gonzalo’s passions are travel, international geopolitics, cinema and his 4-year-old son Hugo.