Hala Matar Choufany has advised on more than 5,000 hospitality projects across four continents. At FHS World 2026 in Dubai, the President of HVS for the Middle East, Africa and South Asia will argue that ambition is no longer the scarce commodity. Delivery is.
For most of the past decade, the hospitality industry kept score by counting. New keys signed, new destinations announced, new pipelines unveiled. Hala Matar Choufany has spent that decade, and the one before it, doing something less glamorous and considerably more useful. She has put numbers on the ambition and told clients, plainly, whether those numbers hold.
That work has made her one of the most consulted voices in hospitality investment across the Middle East and Africa. It has also shaped the argument she brings to FHS World 2026, which runs at Madinat Jumeirah in Dubai from 29 September to 1 October and which organisers describe as the largest and most influential hospitality investment event in the region. Her thesis is short. The next cycle will not reward the best announcements. It will reward the best operators.
The business she built: advice as infrastructure
HVS is the only global consulting company focused solely on hospitality. Choufany serves as its President for the Middle East, Africa and South Asia and sits on the board of HVS Global. Over twenty years she has advised on more than 5,000 hospitality and mixed use projects across Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia, spanning valuations, acquisitions, asset management, strategic investment and development, contract negotiations and broader real estate strategy.
Volume of that kind buys something no single transaction can: pattern recognition. She has authored more than 50 publications, sits on the boards of the Harvard Business School Club of the GCC and the Hotel Investment Advisory Board, and is a frequent commentator on Al Arabiya, Bloomberg, Abu Dhabi TV, CNN, Forbes and Breaking Travel News.
The industry has marked the record. Global Tourism Forum named her Best Woman in Tourism Leadership at its 2025 annual meeting in Brussels. The Future Hospitality Summit presented her with its Excellence Award in June 2025. HORECA and Hospitality News Middle East gave her an Industry Excellence Award in April 2024, and she was selected among the 100 Most Influential in Middle East Hospitality and Travel that same year, having appeared on comparable lists of influential women in the industry in 2013 and 2020.
From building to operating
Ask Choufany what will most influence global hospitality investment over the next five years and she does not start with supply. She starts with what happens after the ribbon is cut.
“Over the last decade, success was often measured by the ability to deliver new assets and expand supply,”
The next five years, in her reading, will measure something harder: how well those assets are run, managed and positioned once they are open. With the cost of capital still elevated and investment committees applying more discipline, she notes that underwriting assumptions are being tested more rigorously than in previous cycles. Her conclusion is that
“operational excellence is becoming just as important as development capability.”
For owners, that reframes the whole exercise. A signed management agreement is not a return. It is a promise that has to be operated into existence.
Gulf capital, African fundamentals
The second shift she identifies is about where money now comes from and how it reads risk. Gulf sovereign, institutional and private capital is increasingly exploring African markets, and, just as importantly, more investors are assessing individual African destinations on their own fundamentals rather than through one continental lens.
Her current work illustrates the trend. HVS is advising on a major mixed use destination in Egypt with Qatari Diar, an engagement that runs from feasibility and market positioning through operator selection and long term operating strategy. Egypt is a fair test case: it accounts for over one third of Africa’s hotel development pipeline. The questions clients now ask her, she says, go well beyond development volume, reaching into “the optimal mix of uses, phasing strategies, operating structures” and how value is created over time.
Alongside advisory work, HVS keeps investing in market intelligence through its Owner and Investor Survey, the Hotel Valuation Index, pipeline analysis and owner focused research across Africa and the Middle East. The purpose is straightforward. “Reliable data is essential to improving transparency, supporting investment decisions, and ensuring that risk is assessed based on evidence rather than perception,” she says.
The message she carries to FHS World 2026
FHS World 2026 released its latest line up of government representatives and industry leaders on 9 September, and Choufany is among the confirmed speakers. Her message is compact.
“My key message will be that the industry’s next chapter will be defined by execution,”
She intends to push two fundamentals that rarely generate headlines. The first is connectivity, meaning air access, transport infrastructure and digital capability. The second is service delivery. “Destinations that invest in talent development, operational excellence and consistently high service standards will be best positioned to maximise returns and strengthen their competitiveness over time,” she says. Neither factor photographs well at a groundbreaking. Both decide whether guests return. She will also press a correction on how the continent is discussed.
“Africa should not be viewed as a single market or assessed primarily through a risk lens,” she says, adding that “in many cases, the opportunities available are stronger than prevailing perceptions suggest.”
What executives can take from the record
Three lessons sit inside her career. Build an evidence base before you build anything else, because capital increasingly follows verifiable numbers rather than narrative. Treat operations as strategy, not as the thing that happens after strategy. And refuse the single story about any market, including your own.
Her own summary is powerful.
Capital “remains available for compelling opportunities, but it is becoming more selective and the opportunity across Africa is significant, but success will ultimately depend on converting ambition into delivery.”
FHS World 2026 runs from 29 September – 1 October 2026 at the Madinat Jumeirah, Dubai, UAE. Pan-African Voice is an official media partner of FHS World.
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