Marugal Hotel Management, Arnaud Laporte-Weywada

I am Arnaud Laporte-Weywada, the President of Marugal France, a hotel management company that I run with my partner Pablo Carrington, who is based in Spain. Marugal has a historical presence in France and Spain, and we expanded into Portugal 3 years ago with the opening of the first Christian Louboutin hotel.

He entrusted us with the management. We supported the project for a year and a half, and now it's a hotel that has been operational for a little over a year, and we are currently working on a second hotel with him. Since 2020, we had another project in the south of Portugal in an absolutely extraordinary city called Tavira.

One project that took some time was an old palace in the heart of the city. There was also COVID, which slowed down many things. And finally today, we are going to open this new 36-room hotel called Palácio de Tavira.

Marugal has always created destination places, boutique hotels with a strong personality, and all of this is based on a relationship of trust with our partners. It's truly a shared history. So we are going to create a destination with a property owner, and we are going to surround ourselves with what we consider to be our best partners to bring this identity that we are developing to the hotel.

And with Influence Society, we quickly understood that there was an alignment in our vision of hospitality to reflect the identity of places. So that has really been the basis of our partnership. We need to have partners with whom there is fluidity in the exchange, mutual understanding, and above all, who are proactive in proposing optimization or development of our venues in relation to the image we want to portray. Influence Society has completely met these expectations, and it is essential for us to have partners like them with all the difficulties one can encounter at some point in a hotel launch.

Having trusted partners already solves a lot of problems for us. What was very appreciated from the start with Influence Society was the responsiveness, and the ease of having interlocutors. So very quickly, it became very clear who we were going to work with, and how we were going to work.

We have a large internal marketing team that is also used to working with a number of restaurateurs, and they really appreciated the entire ecosystem that was put in place to support the project. What particularly interests us is that we started with websites for new hotels that we launched. But with Influence Society, I know I can explore other topics such as our entire advertising approach, or also the entire reflection on AI, which is very important for us and is often poorly integrated or not integrated enough into hotel issues.

Another point that is also very important to us is that a hotel is a constantly evolving entity. So we need to make adjustments to the website because there are new offers, or because there is an adjustment to the menu. The Webflow solution that was proposed to us allowed us to interact and also to be autonomous on a number of minor modifications that actually represent a lot of interventions on the site. For us, this Webflow solution was absolutely perfect for easy onboarding by teams, and that's a real plus in the company's offering.

What is important for us, who now have a European dimension, is to have a partner with an international capacity. We are not a company centered only on France or Spain. Today, we have a huge amount of development work and requests for new projects.

And Influence Society, through its development and the groups we work with today, has completely understood and integrated our topics and our support in our international development. And that's also what we were looking for. We know that with Influence Society, we will have the capacity to respond regardless of the destination.