Octavian Moldovan: Authentic Leadership and the Future of Hospitality in Romania

Octavian Moldovan shares insights about his journey in the hospitality industry, people-centered leadership, the challenges of HoReCa, and his vision for premium tourism in Romania.

Octavian Moldovan is a hospitality professional and entrepreneur with nearly 30 years of experience in hotel management and premium HoReCa concept development. Throughout his career, he has coordinated major projects such as Sheraton Bucharest Hotel, Suter Palace Boutique Hotel, Green Village Resort, and Hotel Orizont Predeal, and is currently leading the development of Radisson Blu Hotel Sinaia Cota 1400. Known for his leadership style based on empathy, transparency, and people development, Octavian Moldovan promotes a modern vision of hospitality in which authentic experiences and human connections are at the core of success.

C&B: How would you describe yourself in a single sentence, in a way that captures the attention of someone who doesn’t know you?

Octavian Moldovan: I am the traveler who enjoys the experiences of this life and the trains he chooses to board. I care about the people I meet and I try to leave kind words and good deeds along my path. For me, being a good person comes before being a good professional.

C&B: Looking back, what is the “common thread” that guided your professional journey?

Octavian Moldovan: The first defining moment came during university, when, although I was studying finance and banking, I chose the hospitality industry, following my father’s example, for whom I had also worked since childhood until graduating high school. I loved the fast-paced nature of HoReCa so much that I could not imagine myself behind a bank desk with a fixed schedule.

Then came the HoJo (Howard Johnson Grand Plaza) period, where, over the course of 11 years, I went through every operational management role within a 5-star hotel. Later, after a rebranding and renovation process, HoJo became Sheraton Bucharest Hotel, with me taking over the responsibilities of a General Manager. Two years later, I chose the entrepreneurial path alongside my own hospitality consulting and management company. It was the “from the canteen to GM” period, as I like to say with a smile.

Since 2017, I have been involved in various management and consulting projects, including Suter Palace Boutique Hotel 5*, the opening of Ramada by Wyndham Râmnicu Vâlcea, Hotel Riviera Mamaia, Olănești Hotel & Spa, Green Village Resort 4*, Valea Verde Retreat, and Hotel Orizont Predeal, the latter three operating under The Makers management company umbrella.

I can say that I have had a step-by-step professional journey focused on continuous learning, gaining experience, career advancement, and entrepreneurship, with determination, ambition, and the joy of working with wonderful people forming the foundation of all my decisions.

The most recent decision I made was joining the Premier Hospitality team at the beginning of this year, where, alongside Lucian Marinescu and Călin Ile, I will refine the concept of hospitality in Romania, starting with Radisson Blu Hotel Sinaia Cota 1400, which I will lead.

C&B: What was a difficult moment or a failure that truly changed you?

Octavian Moldovan: I have had a few lessons to learn from certain experiences, but I never became completely stuck because of them and I never viewed them as failures. Difficult moments were everywhere: pain, sadness, frustration, stress, even tears. However, I approached them with the mindset that I cannot change what depends on others, and I always found solutions to turn challenges into opportunities, sometimes working only on myself and with myself.

One example I encountered in several situations was the partial renovation of hotels while they were still operating. It is a difficult decision to make; if you completely close the hotel, you lose revenue, your team, and part of your clientele, while if you renovate partially and gradually, you find yourself caught between two worlds: the guest area with impeccable services and the construction area, dirty and under renovation. I moved forward and found solutions to satisfy both the clients and the investor, minimizing losses and making the best of the situation. And during such a project, you practically say goodbye to your personal life.

C&B: What is a courageous (or counterintuitive) decision that significantly influenced your trajectory?

Octavian Moldovan: During the pandemic, when nothing was happening in the market and HoReCa was collapsing, I received a partnership proposal from Dragoș Anastasiu within The Makers company. Our goal was to create a multi-property management company for independent non-branded units and to encourage passionate Romanians to promote our country as much as possible. As a result, I turned down an offer from abroad that would have brought me no satisfaction other than financial gain, something I do not place that much emphasis on, and I do not regret this decision.

Since 2020, I have been more active in the Danube Delta and Transylvania, focusing on the growth of leisure tourism, aimed at explorers and nature lovers, through a slower type of tourism where I somehow rediscovered the feeling of returning to my roots and to simple things done with soul. Unfortunately, the number of foreign tourists was practically nonexistent in 2020–2021 due to the pandemic, and later because of the war in Ukraine, which reduced the chances of sharing internationally what we had built there.

These were 5 years full of meaningful experiences, during which I also learned what it means to work in a village located where the land meets the sea, dealing with the people and mentality of the place, without the comfort of the city, without logistics, and facing all the challenges of nature.

C&B: How have you changed over time as a leader?

Octavian Moldovan: I have always been calm and understanding, offering support to the people in my teams and remaining loyal to employers and partners. People’s behaviors and customer preferences, both internal and external, have gradually changed alongside understanding, learning, experience, and technology. Ten to twenty years ago, in hospitality, truly important decisions were made once a year, usually during budgeting periods, so we had more time to analyze and wait. Today, we no longer have that luxury; I make decisions at the same pace as change itself, relying on the experience I have accumulated.

A common example: you send or receive an email involving actions that require multiple colleagues. If you are not specific, with a clear deadline and responsibility assigned, nobody takes ownership of collective tasks or initiates decisions. In general, people avoid responsibility and wait for others to act. And then, either you insist, try, search, and wait, delaying results, or you make the decision yourself and move forward. I have a saying: worse than making a bad decision is making no decision at all.

C&B: What do you think people who work directly with you say about you — beyond your public image?

Octavian Moldovan: After nearly 30 years in this industry, what makes me happy is the fact that I still have in my phone contacts the colleagues I worked with since my early years, that we still keep in touch, and that I receive messages of gratitude when they themselves reach leadership positions. I have examples where I congratulate a former waiter colleague, Marius, who is now a CEO managing several hotels abroad, and whom I encouraged at the right moment to make a certain decision. I am happy for him and proud of him.

In general, I have always been open to valuable, good people, without selfish interests, whom I encourage and guide throughout their journey. Many times, I have been “criticized” for being too kind, too permissive, and for “not banging my fist on the table” hard enough. I do not believe management should be done only through force, and I believe people can also be led in a more humane way, with civilized behavior, encouragement, and emotion, not through the rigidity and coldness typical of an authoritarian boss.

I cannot stand gossip, deceit, bribery, theft, laziness, or arrogance; perhaps it is from such people that I may have received negative feedback. Otherwise, I am satisfied knowing that I have left a positive mark on the souls of those I have worked with.

C&B: What truly differentiates you in the way you build or lead?

Octavian Moldovan: Humanity is, for me, the decisive differentiating factor in any type of relationship. Everything I do is connected to this aspect; this is also how I build my team, bringing together people with shared values. I believe in the principle of equal opportunities offered from the very beginning, in delegation and empowerment, while analyzing within a relatively short time who fits my model and who does not.

We work in hospitality and provide services that we ourselves would like to benefit from wherever we go. Following this principle, I teach and guide everyone who is open-minded; I do not keep everything to myself, I am completely transparent, and I communicate constantly with my team. I encourage ideas, new projects, and anything that can come from any player within the company, regardless of their role.

One of the common mistakes encountered in Romania’s HoReCa industry is when the manager or owner wants to keep everything under their own control and does not take the team’s opinions into account. And one of the fatal mistakes of an employee or colleague is behaving indifferently, with the mindset of “it’s not my job” or “it’ll do anyway.”

C&B: How has the current context (technology, AI, economy) changed the way you work?

Octavian Moldovan: First of all, it has changed the way we approach human relationships, both within the team and externally, with our guests. We constantly put ourselves in the customer’s shoes and perspective: how they think, what they want, how they would feel appreciated, and so on. We always try to respond with “yes, it’s possible” and smile even when, sometimes, we may not fully agree. This means acceptance, wisdom, and accountability, not hypocrisy, as I have sometimes heard people say.

Then, of course, every business also has a budget, and my responsibility is to ensure a positive result. The necessary measures are not always pleasant, but every time I try to compensate, to offer something else in return, and to satisfy as many participants in the process as possible.

I rely on people and on the added value they can bring in front of the client, on the strength of the team rather than individual qualities, on the power of willingness and determination, with money or financial results being merely a consequence of our actions. Nowadays, technology, and especially AI, plays a crucial role, but it becomes useless and sometimes dangerous when people do not know how to work with it. Humans use the machine, not the other way around.

C&B: Is there a habit or routine that has significantly influenced your performance?

Octavian Moldovan: I can say yes, there are several elements that help me maintain my balance. Planning is one of them, annual, monthly, weekly, and then daily planning. I always keep a calendar that I update every day, where I write down everything I have to do, “to do” lists in my agenda, actions with deadlines and assigned responsibilities, as well as other similar tracking and measurement tools.

Then there is time discipline, which has changed as I gained experience and as the priorities of different stages of life evolved. In the past, I did not even notice when 14–16 hours a day, 7 days a week, would pass; that is roughly how much time I spent in hotels and restaurants for 20 years. Now, however, I organize my time differently, moving from micromanagement to strategic planning, delegating and mentoring other colleagues to grow as I did.

I recharge my batteries in nature, in the sun, in peaceful and relaxing places whenever I can; it is my way of putting a stop to continuous activity. During my vacations, my phone becomes just a camera, I do not read emails or messages, I completely disconnect, which I recommend every healthy person should do, not just once, but several times a year.

Life has shown me that results improve after periods of rest, that new ideas emerge when your mind is rested rather than stressed, and that everything becomes clearer when you are relaxed, helping you make better decisions. And when you are sick or exhausted, not only can you no longer help yourself, but you cannot help others either.

C&B: What principles guide the important decisions you make?

Octavian Moldovan: Experience, knowledge, and intuition, not necessarily in this order. It is a mix between what I learned in schools, including at EHL (École Hôtelière de Lausanne), the practical applicability of that knowledge, my life experience, and that inner instinct that comes from within when you feel compelled to do good.

Each of these principles has been applied depending on the desired outcome of every decision. I have always tried to maintain a balance between customer feedback, colleagues’ satisfaction, and positive financial results.

C&B: How do you see the evolution of your field over the next 3–5 years?

Octavian Moldovan: Tourism is a continuously developing industry and it will clearly continue to grow in scale, as the population’s tendency is moving toward fewer working hours and more free time. Free time leads to more frequent travel and, consequently, to a larger number of potential hotel guests.

There are both risks and opportunities across different market segments. For example, with an aging population on the rise and a younger population decreasing, preferences and experiences will continue to evolve over time. Young couples and younger generations, in general, take more mini-vacations throughout the year, with an average duration of 2–4 nights, but they spend less per getaway, while another category is driving the growth of the all-inclusive segment, preferred by families with children and seniors for stays of 5–7 nights.

If you correctly identify the relationship between the product (what you offer), the services (how you offer them), the guests (who you offer them to), and the experiences (what creates the “wow” factor), then you will always be in demand.

C&B: What role do you aim to have in this evolution?

Octavian Moldovan: I will contribute to the development of tourism in our country, to show that we also have wonderful people and services “like abroad,” to build that equation “what + how + for whom = wow” as well as possible, so that it lasts as long as possible. I want Europe, and not only Europe, to speak about Romania as an example of hospitality, and the hotels I will lead, led by Radisson Blu Hotel Sinaia Cota 1400, to become examples of best practices.

The main objective I have as GM (General Manager) of the hotel at Cota 1400 is to build notoriety, to place it on the map of the great mountain resort hotels, where you can find the defining elements of a premium vacation like in the Alps, not only during the winter season. Today, all luxury resorts are located in Switzerland, Italy, France, and Austria, and I will bring a little from each to Romania, hoping that we too will soon reach this Top 5.

C&B: What real advice would you give to someone who wants to build something relevant today?

Octavian Moldovan: Throughout my career, I have learned not to rush into areas I do not know well, and I have always relied on the people with expertise around me. My message to investors is to present their vision, values, desired result, and implementation deadline to professionals or consultants in this field, to ask for several scenarios to fulfill that dream, and, most importantly, to listen.

And for someone at the beginning of their career in this wonderful field, or even on the verge of a professional conversion, my advice is to have the necessary patience to follow the steps required to gain sufficient experience. Many do not understand that working in tourism or HoReCa does not mean a job where you collect a salary and tips, but the opportunity to relate to other people, smiling genuinely, not falsely, and later gaining many other opportunities, not only immediate ones.

And for both categories, perhaps the most valuable advice is: take care of those around you.

C&B: What is an uncomfortable truth about your field that few people talk about?

Octavian Moldovan: Just like in other fields, there are too many ways through which people manage only in their own interest, and this is possible because they are allowed to do so. There is a comfortable, complacent majority, and there is also that minority that wants to change the bad habits of the past, that wants to leave something behind through honest means, to build for future generations or simply for the joy of their own soul.

Most people manage somehow. Regardless of morality, regardless of how difficult things are, they find a way to do it, whether respecting the laws of this country or not. Some are honest, others less so, and they are not to be judged; need, desire, possibilities, or the lack of them lead each person toward their own choices.

Looking at Romanian hospitality from the outside, it is easy to draw conclusions by generalizing and throwing mud. It bitterly amuses me that many Romanians complain about our services, while so many foreigners praise us all over the world, without any particular interest…

I wish the best for everyone: as many hotels and guests as possible, as much exposure as possible, and more goodwill in sitting at the same table, with common goals and ideals.

The interview with Octavian Moldovan highlights not only the experience of a hospitality leader, but also the perspective of a professional who places people, authenticity, and human values at the center of every decision. Through the balance between performance, empathy, and strategic vision, he outlines a new generation of leadership in the HoReCa industry, focused on sustainable development and memorable experiences. In a constantly evolving field, his perspective offers both a realistic and optimistic outlook on the future of tourism and hospitality in Romania.