Speaker: Aradhana Khowala, Chief Executive Officer & Founder

Aradhana Khowala is globally identified as an authority on the travel, tourism and hospitality industries and has two decades of experience across 70+ countries in four continents. She is currently CEO & Founder of Aptamind Partners a Private Client Advisory that is a trusted advisor to ambitious leaders in Governments, Family Offices, Private UHNW Investors and International Organisations.

An experienced Board Member she has an active portfolio of Board roles. Aradhana currently serves as the Chair of the Advisory Board of the Red Sea Project in Saudi Arabia which is wholly owned by the Public Investment Fund, the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia. Her multifunctional role is to develop and implement a new international standard in environmental protection and restoration, sustainable development, innovation and luxury tourism in the Kingdom. Previously she was the CEO of Tourism Sector at NEOM in Saudi Arabia – the US$ 500 Billion land of the future purpose-built for a sustainable and a new way of living.

Aradhana also serves as a Board Member and Steering Committee member of World Tourism Forum Lucerne a highly focused, top-level, strategic body that brings together selected leaders around the world to reflect on the big challenges facing the industry. She is also a Board Member and member of the Audit and Risk Committee of Elaf Group which is a fully subsidiary of a PLC. In the past she has worked for Jones Lang LaSalle, covering UK, Benelux and Scandinavian markets, a Strategy Consulting practice in Europe/Asia as well as in Hospitality Operations in India. A keen industry practitioner, she is a regular speaker, moderator and presenter at the foremost Family Office conferences as well as Tourism and Leadership Summits around the world. A passionate advocate of the transformative power of tourism and the prospect it presents for combining conservation with community, culture and commerce, she spends a lot of her time engaging Presidents, Prime Ministers and Tourism Ministers on using Tourism as a force for good and has interviewed hundreds of government representatives and CEO’s globally on key challenges facing the sector. Aradhana has won multiple awards including the 21st Century Icon Awards in 2017 in association with CNBC and London School of Economics as an Inspirational Game Changer. In 2014, she was featured as one of the 50 most Influential Next Generation leaders who will likely define the future of the luxury tourism sector by Swiss Economic magazine Bilan. She is a certified NLP Coach (Neuro Linguistic Programming) and has an MBA from Ecole hôtelière de Lausanne in Switzerland. She also guest-lectures on tourism, leadership and entrepreneurship at different Universities globally. Aradhana also sits on the Board of Educating the Children which is a charity that beautifully weaves together her passion for Africa with the purpose of educating the children – a cause very close to her heart.