Paul Jordaan has been appointed as Group Chief Operating and Development Officer at Experiential Hospitality Group
Experiential Hospitality Group has named Paul Jordaan as Group Chief Operating and Development Officer. Jordaan joined EHG as part of its founding leadership team, helping shape the operating and development platform from its earliest stages. He leads the development, opening, and operation of the group's portfolio, translating ambitious, nature-led concepts into commercially sound destinations with a strong sense of place.
His path to hospitality began on his family's wine estate in Stellenbosch, where he grew up around the seasonal rhythm of harvest. Jordaan expected to continue the family tradition of winemaking, until a gap year working in London changed his course. A part-time position at The Ritz London revealed the craft and human energy behind exceptional hospitality, and he returned to South Africa to study hotel management. Later, he trained in winemaking in France, an experience that deepened his understanding of provenance, seasonality, and the relationship between hospitality and land.
That foundation shaped a career spanning more than two decades across Africa, Asia, the Middle East, the Caribbean, and the Pacific, including senior roles with Aman Resorts, Six Senses, Virgin Limited Edition, Elewana Collection, Grootbos Private Nature Reserve, and a portfolio of New Zealand luxury lodges, before joining the founding leadership team at ENVI Lodges. His work has taken him from opening Aman properties in India, where he was closely involved in Bengal tiger conservation efforts and the preservation of ecosystems surrounding the country's national parks, to leading Six Senses resorts in Oman and Vietnam. In East Africa, he guided Elewana lodges in Zanzibar and the Serengeti, working with local stakeholders to professionalise guiding programmes across the region's luxury lodges and recognising guides as a critical link between guests, wildlife, and place. He later repositioned Treetops Lodge & Estate and Kinloch Manor in New Zealand.
His early work helping open Grootbos Private Nature Reserve, today recognised among the world's leading luxury lodges, shaped his conviction that hospitality and land stewardship serve the same goal. That experience, along with years spent living and working in destinations where tourism's success depends directly on the health of the ecosystems around it, convinced Jordaan that the industry's responsibility is to protect the very qualities that make a destination extraordinary, and to ensure the communities surrounding it participate in and benefit from that conservation.
Jordaan's work today draws on that full arc of experience — operations, development, conservation, guiding, and remote destinations — to translate EHG's philosophy into destinations from the ground up. For Jordaan, luxury is increasingly defined by access, authenticity, space, time, and intentionally personal service, and he holds a firmly contrarian view that sustainability and luxury work in the same direction: thoughtful restraint and a lighter footprint produce a more distinctive, more emotionally resonant experience than conventional luxury amenities.