Carmen Mladenovic.
Hospitality, personally.

From running the operation
to helping you shape yours.

Looking after a guest’s time is what has kept me in hospitality for sixteen years. It is still what gets me out of bed.

Twelve of those years were with Uniworld, where every ship has its own character and the service has to match it. Then a year and a half with Viking, where the promise is the opposite: whichever ship you board, you know exactly what you will get. And then Transcend, where I helped build a hotel operation from the drawings up, alongside the designer, the yard and the suppliers.

Three very different ideas of a good stay. What they had in common was the question I ended up asking every day: what should the guest feel here, and does the operation actually make that possible?

More often than not, the answer was in the details nobody had written down. The handover between departments. How a new crew member was welcomed in their first week. Whether the pantry was in the right place for the way the restaurant really ran.

I started Custom Hospitality to work on exactly those things, with operators who want their guests to feel looked after and their teams to feel capable of delivering it. I listen first, I am honest about what I see, and I stay involved until the change holds without me.

I am based in Haarlem, in the Netherlands, and work on board and on site across Europe and the United States, in English or Dutch.