Founder Zoe Lau Gungor says the future of hospitality investment networking belongs to trusted conversations, not crowded conference halls.
The Room That Wasn’t
It always starts with hope.
You arrive at a grand hotel ballroom, name badge in hand, scanning the crowd for faces you recognise. You are a hospitality investor — perhaps a family office principal deploying capital into wellness resorts, or a fund manager evaluating your first luxury boutique asset. You have flown in specifically for this. Cleared three days from a calendar that does not forgive. You told your board there was intelligence here worth gathering.
The programme promises the world. Global thought leaders. Disruptive panels. Networking receptions where deals are allegedly born. You sit in row forty-seven of a ballroom designed for eight hundred, watching a speaker deliver a presentation you could have read in a white paper. Around you, two hundred people scroll their phones. The person to your left is a sponsorship executive from a consultancy. The person to your right is a student writing a thesis. Neither has deployed a dollar into hospitality in their lives.
At the coffee break, you stand in a circle of strangers exchanging business cards nobody will follow up on. The conversation stays surface-level because nobody in the circle has any skin in the same game. You mention a due diligence question that has been keeping you awake — something specific about wellness hospitality RevPAR economics — and receive polite nods in return. Nobody in this room has walked the back of the house of a wellness asset. Nobody has seen the P&L.
By the second day, a quiet conviction settles over you: you should not be here. This event was not designed for someone at your level of seriousness. It was designed for volume — for sponsors, for students, for the merely curious. The real investors, you later learn, skipped the morning sessions entirely. They held their meetings in suites upstairs, in the restaurants down the street, in WhatsApp groups you were not invited to. The event you paid to attend was, for them, merely a convenient excuse to be in the same city.
You fly home with a stack of business cards from people you will never call, having heard nothing that changed how you think, and having met nobody who could help you make a better decision. The hope you arrived with has been quietly replaced by something more dangerous: the belief that this is simply how the industry operates. That insight is meant to be scarce. That genuine peer connection is a matter of luck.
I have heard this story more times than I care to count. And I refuse to believe it is the best we can do.
What People Actually Want Now
Here is what has changed — and what the conference industry has been slow to understand.
The modern hospitality investor does not attend an event to be entertained. They do not need a stage, a spotlight, or a carefully choreographed production. Every piece of information that could be delivered from a podium — every market trend, every case study, every data point — is already available to them online. In their hotel room that morning, they read three industry reports on their iPad. They do not need someone to read a fifth one aloud to a ballroom.
What they cannot get from a screen — what no webinar, no white paper, no LinkedIn post can replicate — is the person sitting next to them.
The true essence of an event, from now and beyond, is not content delivery. It is relationship architecture. It is the deliberate creation of conditions where the right people recognise each other, trust each other, and decide to do something together. It is the conversation that starts at dinner and continues six months later over a term sheet. It is the quiet admission, in a room where confidentiality is assumed, that a deal you thought was brilliant actually failed — and the person who hears it learns something no case study could ever teach them.
The modern event-goer wants intimacy, not scale. They want depth, not breadth. They want to know who is in the room, why they were invited, and what they are willing to share when the microphones are off. They want to leave with two or three genuine connections, not a hundred business cards they will never use.
And yet the industry keeps building ballrooms.
What We Are Building Instead
“The value of HI Connect+ is directly proportional to the quality of the people in the room. My job as community curator is not to put on a show. It is to ensure that every person in that room has earned their seat — and is willing to share what they know.”
HI Connect+ was founded on a simple observation: the most valuable moments in hospitality investing happen in small, trusted circles — and those moments should not be left to chance.
We are the deliberate antithesis of the mass-scale conference. A curated membership community where invited investors, owners, capital allocators, and ecosystem enablers gather for immersive, trust-based dialogue — both online through the year and in person at carefully designed gatherings.
We do not sell tickets. We do not pursue volume. We cultivate the quality of conversation within. Every member is personally invited and vetted not merely for capital capacity, but for their willingness to contribute candour and insight.
Our programme prioritises Conversations Over Presentations. Each gathering combines curated leadership roundtables, exclusive open-house visits to operating hospitality assets, and private galas where the best insights come from the person seated to your left. Members do not listen to panels — they walk through the back of the house, examine the P&L drivers, and ask the founders why they made the choices they did.
The value of HI Connect+ is directly proportional to the quality of the people in the room. That is not a tagline. It is our operating principle.
My Invitation to You
HI Connect+ is not for everyone.
It is for the investor who has sat in that ballroom and known, with quiet certainty, that they deserved something better. For the operator who has built something extraordinary and wishes to share it with peers who will grasp its significance. For the family office principal stewarding a hospitality legacy across generations. For the fund manager who believes that genuine dialogue, well-curated, is a competitive advantage worth investing in.
If you share this conviction and if you are prepared to contribute what you know in a setting where confidentiality is assumed and trust is the entry fee, then Founder & Community Curator Zoe Lau Gungor invites you to consider joining HI Connect+.
Membership is by invitation and application. Every member is selected not merely for their capital, but for their willingness to make the room better by being in it. The value of HI Connect+ is directly proportional to the quality of the people in the room and that begins with you. To learn more, visit hiconnectplus.com.
