is the founder and editor-in-chief of hospitalityInside.com. She entered the world of hotel topics intensively in 1990, starting with a hotel trade magazine, then contributing to many leading business media and trade publications in Germany, Switzerland and UK (e.g. Handelsblatt, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Business Traveller, FVW, AHGZ, hotel + tourismus revue), for which she worked as a freelance journalist. For 15 years she travelled the world, in 2002 she published her first book (Wellness + Wirtschaft - professionell und profitabel) - and then founded hospitalityInside.com in 2005 as one of the first paid content models in the European trade media landscape, as an ad-free and bilingual publication. Quality journalism and well-founded content form the backbone of the medium and the publishing house.

In parallel, Maria Puetz-Willems organised the first wellness conference at ITB Berlin, she helped launch the first hotel conference in the ITB convention programme in 2006 and organised it until 2017. Since 2006, she has also organised the Hospitality Industry Dialogue (HID) at Europe's leading trade fair for property and Investment Expo Real in Munich without interruption.

hospitalityInside.com sees itself as a top-class, international information network for the entire industry, which includes not only hotel operators but also finance and real estate experts. With its own initiatives such as the HITT / HospitalityInside Think Tank since 2018, the publishing company sets new, innovative and cross-industry accents in the area of digitalisation and sustainability (www.hitt.world). Further networking events with market-leading partners bring readers and partners together at top level in a personal way.

Kirsten Posautz studied comparative literature in Mainz, completed a traineeship and then worked for specialised publishing houses and companies as well as freelance journalists for print media and PR agencies. The hotel industry crystallised early on as her focus. She dedicated herself to this industry at the trade magazine Top hotel, later also as co-author of a B2C hotel guide series and as project manager of spa and wellness books. Most recently, Kirsten Posautz was deputy editor-in-chief of the trade magazine hotelbau before moving to hospitalityInside.com in the same position in February 2024.

started in journalism, after studying at the University of Konstanz and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, as a trainee at the trade magazine Top hotel in Landsberg in 2007. As a trained editor, the Swabian-born journalist moved to the Augsburger Allgemeine publishing house and worked in the publishing publications department as a PR journalist for 13 years . In April 2023, she returned to the subject of her heart, the hotel industry, and has been working as an editor for HospitalityInside ever since.

has a degree in business administration and is a qualified hotel manager, making her the ideal hotel journalist with over 30 years of knowledge about the German hotel industry. She has been writing for hospitalityInside.com since it was founded in March 2005, today in the role of a Senior Writer. Among other things, she was the editor-in-chief of the trade magazine First Class, Restaurant International and the newsletter Cost & Logis. Today she writes for the trade magazine Top hotel and writes for staff magazines and customer magazines.

Sarah Douag studied tourism and marketing in Cannes. After her master's degree, the Frenchwoman worked for a travel agency for seven years. Since then, her international media circle has included the French publications Le Quotidien du Tourisme, occasionally Le Figaro and the weekend magazine of Le Monde. She now lives in Amsterdam with her family, which makes her stories about the hospitality market and its trends that much more intercultural and global.

Sylvie Konzack studied cultural studies as well as communication and media sciences in Leipzig and then did a traineeship at the hotel and gastronomy publishing house B&L MedienGesellschaft in Munich. From 2007, she worked as an editor at the hotel trade magazine First Class in Munich, advancing to deputy editor-in-chief in 2010 and rising to editor-in-chief in 2012 (until 2017). Since 2018, she has been working as a freelance journalist for various hotel trade, business and travel magazines and co-founded the magazine Bleisure Traveller. She has been writing for hospitalityInside.com since 2020, focusing on her favourite topics Bleisure Travel and Serviced Apartments.

Massimiliano Sarti is our correspondent for Italy since 2013 and also part of the editorial team of Italian Travel Quotidiano, a B2B tourism magazine. Prior to this, he worked as editor in chief of Job in Tourism for almost 15 years, a magazine for hospitality professionals. He collaborated with the business travel magazine Mission, edited the Carlson Wagonlit Travel Italia in-house publication CWT Connect and advised The Visual Agency as a journalist, a company specialized in infographics. He published several books about the hotel industry, including the 2009 to 2019 editions of "L'Almanacco di Job in Tourism", and a book on the management of a luxury leisure hotel called "Appunti di management. La gestione di un hotel di lusso leisure".

Fred Fettner has been working as a freelance journalist in the heart of Austrian tourism (Tyrol) since 1990. Besides travel stories (e.g. in ZEIT, GEO-Saison) he has published books as an author (SkiGuideAustria, Alpbachtal - Das Tal der Denker). For over two decades he has been specializing in journalism with the emphasis hotel and tourism. In addition to Austria and neighbouring countries, he also focuses on tourism development in the Far East. Fred Fettner writes for the Austrian daily Salzburger Nachrichten and has been publishing the tourism science journal TourismusWissen-quarterly since 2015. Since 2005 he contributes to hospitalityInside.com.

Macy Marvel has published numerous hospitality and tourism industry reports and press articles. For 20 years he was professor of economics and finance at the Ecole hôtelière de Lausanne (EHL).  Prior to that he spent eight years as investment strategist and financial analyst for two Geneva private banks, before which he held the positions of finance trainer at Digital Equipment Corporation, auditor at the Geneva offices of PwC and securities analyst at The Value Line Survey in New York. Macy holds an M.B.A. from the University of Toronto and an M.A. from the London School of Economics.

Beatrix Boutonnet is a trained hotel business manager and graduate in business administration (FH/University of Applied Sciences) and has been working as a business journalist for many years. Her main topics are finance, open and closed real estate funds, hotel and senior citizen real estate, media, wind, ship and venture capital investments. Her media clients include fondstelegramm, Fondszeitung, Focus, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Capital, Finanzen, Euro and Fonds & Co.

Bärbel Schwertfeger, a Master in Psychology, is a freelance journalist since 1985, writing for German dailys, business magazines and special interest publications, e.g. Capital, FAZ, Handelsblatt, Spiegel online, Personalmagazin, Wirtschaftswoche and ZEIT. Since 2007 she is also editor-in-chief of Wirtschaftspsychologie aktuell, a magazine about business psychology. In 2010 she launched her own website about management education (mba-journal.de). Her focus: HR management, training and MBA. She is also the author of eight books.