Evgenia Lebedeva
For twenty years I have worked on the commercial side of luxury hospitality — not advising from the outside, but carrying the revenue number inside the property.
For eleven of those years I led international sales for Forte Village Resort in Sardinia, where Russia grew into the resort’s largest source market — 35% of guests, ahead of Italy at 20% and the UK at 18% — and the team I led was named Best Sales Team of the Year. I was not doing this from an office: every season from May to September I was on site, working inside the marketing and reservations departments.
At Baglioni Hotels & Resorts I launched Baglioni Resort Maldives into the Russian and CIS market and opened Kazakhstan as a new source market for the property.
Along the way I created FORTEFEST — a music festival produced with Russian Radio and designed to fill October, the resort’s weakest month — and led the property’s entry into the luxury wedding market, which brought it the Best Wedding Resort award in 2016.
I studied Intercultural Communication at Lomonosov Moscow State University and Hospitality Management at the Russian International Academy for Tourism, and completed an MBA in Digital Marketing in 2021.
Italian and Russian are my native languages. I work in English, Italian and Russian, and I live in Sardinia.