Field Notes
From Samsung to Bahía Ballena: the turn that wasn’t in the plan
Between 1995 and 2000 I worked at Samsung Electronics as regional marketing manager for Central America, taking the region’s sales from $3.7 million to $5 million. Two MBAs followed —at Pepperdine and at Tecnológico de Monterrey— along with a period at Capital One in Falls Church, Virginia, leading telemarketing for the Hispanic market. Nothing along that path suggested I would end up running an eco lodge on Costa Rica’s south coast.
The turn
I was living in Washington, D.C., and commuting to work by train. After September 11 the city changed: day and night, police sirens and helicopters could be heard, and the stress became hard to sustain. I decided not to continue, and six months after that date I was back in Costa Rica.
It was then that my father asked whether I wanted to help him with La Cusinga Lodge, a small hotel that was just getting started. I stayed seventeen years as general manager, leading the entire operation: kitchen, dining room, front desk, costs and every guest’s experience. The first months were demanding. I came from a formal corporate structure and suddenly had to define my own role, because the hotel had no structure at all.
What I carried from one world to the other
The first lesson was that the product changes, but the theory and its application stay the same: identifying markets and deciding how to promote them follows a very similar logic. I also learned that everything needs a solid structure, good partnerships and a deep knowledge of the market to understand what you truly have to offer.
I confirmed this when I took over as general manager. I understood that the hotel could not be a conventional one, like those in San José or Miami: it sat in a completely different setting, a remote place with a character of its own. I studied that setting and, from there, began looking for the kind of traveler who truly valued what we offered.
There was also something I had to unlearn. In the United States everything was efficient: many errands were resolved by phone or online, and going to the bank took little time. Here, a single errand meant traveling to San Isidro and standing in line for one, two or three hours, only to be told at the counter that a document was missing. I had to go back, find it and return to the line. Patience was what I had to learn; efficiency, what I had to forget.
From operations to strategy
In 2019 I became marketing manager at the same lodge, leading digital campaigns, market research and the positioning of La Cusinga as a reference point for Costa Rican ecotourism.
Telling a place’s story to the world is different when you know it from the kitchen, the garden, the rooms, the laundry, human resources and the front desk. Having worked in every department taught me to value not only the guest but the team. The most valuable asset of any company is not so much the customer as its people, because the team is what delivers the service and the experience. It makes little sense to treat the guest well if the team does not believe in the project or if leadership does not recognize it as fundamental. To me it is the most important element of the whole process, in a hotel and in any other business.