Hospitalitythat connects
Gabriela Schwan — Hospitality Advisor. Three decades building, operating and repositioning hospitality businesses in Brazil and Portugal.
Let’s talk about your next projectWhy strategichospitality,and whynow
The hospitality market is going through rapid consolidation: chains, developers and funds are competing over operation and product at the same time, and the advantage belongs to whoever solves both sides of that equation.
New models — fractional ownership, branded residences, short-stay, coliving — call for expertise that goes beyond traditional hotel management. And today’s guest decides as much by experience, authenticity and purpose as by price and location.
What the industry lacks is not isolated competence. It is connection. Each discipline delivers its own part well — and the business loses value precisely in the space between them.
Gabriela Schwan
Hospitality Advisor
Hospitality that Connects
About Gabriela
At the first hotel opened by the Schwan family in Rio Grande do Sul, Gabriela was still a child and already welcoming guests at the door. That same door, decades later, keeps opening — to new disciplines, solutions, versions and projects. Hospitality that Connects sums up that thread: an upbringing that became a vocation and has sustained a lifetime devoted to the industry.
Gabriela built her career from inside the industry — from a hotel front desk to the presidency of a hotel group, from day-to-day operations to authoring entire businesses. Over three decades devoted to hospitality in Brazil and Portugal, she combined management discipline with a strategic eye that led her to structure Swan Generation, recognized today by the sector press as Brazil’s first hospitality hub. Along the same path, she led the repositioning behind Jangal das Araucárias, voted Brazil’s best fractional-ownership boutique hotel three years running.
Today she leads GS Hospitality Advisory and Turistalks, and brings her experience to stages and strategic committees as a speaker.
Education
- Hospitality Management — Universidade de Caxias do Sul
- MBA — Fundação Getulio Vargas
- General Managers Program — Cornell University
Executive & institutional roles
- Board member, Swan Hotéis
- Vice-president, Transforma RS
- Active with InvestRS, Amcham RS and Nexo Governança
- Co-founder, Turistech Hub
Recognition
- ADVB/RS Marketing Personality of the Year 2024
- Panrotas 100+ of Brazilian tourism
- ABIH-RS recognition
- Friend of Festuris 2024
- Mapa Pulso 2026/27 — among 30 influential names in Brazilian tourism
Areas of expertise
- Hotel and tourism development
- Advisory for real estate assets
- Governance and hospitality culture
- Customer experience and branding
- Destination positioning
What we aretruly good at
After three decades inside the operation, I learned that hospitality that works lives in the coherence between parts that rarely look at one another — the legal side that structures, the operation that delivers, the marketing that promises, the culture that upholds that promise once the guest has arrived.
What I am truly good at is seeing that coherence before it exists. At taking an asset, a brand or a team and asking: are these pieces telling the same story? They rarely are — and that is where the business loses money without noticing.
My work is to connect what no one has connected yet. What I deliver is architecture: a way of organizing decisions so that hospitality becomes value creation.
Gabriela’sdiscipline,structured asa consultancy
GS Hospitality Consulting brings to other brands, destinations and businesses the same strategic discipline tested against Gabriela’s own P&L.
Who we are
GS Hospitality seal
GS Hospitality is led directly by Gabriela, who acts as lead advisor on every project — from diagnosis to delivery. When the scope calls for other fronts — architecture, engineering, corporate law, performance marketing, F&B — GS mobilizes a network of partner consultants, activated according to what each project actually needs. A single point of contact, one accountability, one standard of delivery.
Purpose, authenticity, culture, innovation, reputation and the client always at the center of the decision — these are the principles that guide this perspective, present in every project GS takes on.
What we do
The work starts from a common core — diagnosis, strategic planning, market analysis and repositioning — always adjusted to each client’s reality. From there, the partnership takes whichever form best serves the moment the business is in.
Strategic Advisory
Ongoing support on a subscription basis, for recurring decisions of high impact.
Organizational Culture
Leadership development and service culture, so the team upholds every day what the brand promises.
Strategic Planning
Diagnosis, market reading and route-setting for the next cycle of the business.
Advisory Board Seat
A standing seat on a board or committee.
Speaking Engagements
Original content on hospitality, experience and value creation, for events, conventions and committees.
How we work
The Architectureof Hospitality®Method
The client at the center of the strategy
The proprietary system that gives practical form to hospitality that connects. The method treats hospitality as transversal intelligence: what runs through and connects every decision in the business, from real estate development to the experience delivered, from operations to the service perceived, from governance to the culture lived, from the brand to the reputation built, and from the journey that awakens desire to the memory that remains.
01Soul
02Strategy
03Expression
04Delivery
05Memory
06Value
Hospitality turns intention into experience, experience into memory, and memory into value.
Whychoose GS
In practice, hospitality that connects translates into four concrete differentiators.
An operator’s perspective
Every recommendation is tested against the experience of someone who has answered for the results — three decades of hands-on operation, not theory.
Genuine customization
Every diagnosis comes from the client’s specific reality, designed from scratch for each new project.
An on-demand network
Specialists mobilized exactly when the scope requires — the efficiency of a lean structure.
A single point of accountability
Gabriela personally leads every project, from start to delivery.
Case study · Swan Generation
When an idlebuilding becamea thesis
When the market still thought of a hotel as rooms and nightly rates, Gabriela saw something else. She saw a building downtown in a city that emptied out after six in the evening — and saw there a business-model problem, far beyond occupancy. The answer was to rethink what that space could be: living, working, lodging, events and dining under one roof, for a generation that integrates where it lives, where it works and where it stays.
That is how Swan Generation was born — described today by the sector press as Brazil’s first hospitality hub. It was a thesis about how cities and hospitality would meet from then on, tested with real capital.
+198%growth in mixed-use revenue
Swan Generation
Five businesses the market treated separately came to sustain one another under the same roof. The lesson that stayed was about looking at an idle asset and asking: what other business could this same space sustain?
Beyondconsulting
Connecting also means bringing together the people who build the industry and making what a project needs possible.
Turistalks
Turistalks
The intelligence hub Gabriela founded to connect the most relevant voices in Brazilian tourism and hospitality — conversations that become applied intelligence for those building businesses in the industry.
Furniture & direct importing
Furniture & direct importing
A strategic direct-import partnership for developers, real estate companies and hotels seeking international standards with CAPEX efficiency — enabling reductions of up to 30% in furniture and FF&E investment.
The doors Gabriela began opening as a child keep opening — to new projects, new partnerships, new businesses.