Why a 'Generation Translator' Would Backfire: Ilona Guérin on the Next Generation of Hoteliers

At the EHL HumanX Summit in Lausanne, Simone Puorto sat down with Ilona Guérin, a final-year student at EHL and President of the Young Hospitality Summit, the largest student-led event of its kind. Among a programme of chief executives and founders, Guérin spoke for the generation everyone else kept talking about. Two months earlier she had run her own summit on the same campus, built around a single theme, transmission between generations. The full conversation is available to watch below.

The summit, and a generation that wants in

Guérin's summit brought together eighty-five delegates from more than thirty nationalities and thirty schools, across every continent, around the idea of passing on the torch. What she took from it was reassurance on both sides. The next generation of hoteliers wants to learn and to discuss, and the older generation wants to share its passion and hand that passion on.

The headlines at HumanX were AI, digital transformation and how Gen Z sees work differently. Underneath all of that, she said, the desire to work in hospitality and to understand it is very much intact. The passion is still there, and so is the appetite to get into the industry.

What to keep, and what to leave behind

Asked what her generation will inherit and what it will reject, Guérin started with adaptability. Hospitality teaches you to think on your feet and to shift your manner to the guest in front of you, and that, she said, is the trade at its core. It is the thing worth carrying forward.

What she expects to fade is the very traditional mindset, the fixed standards handed down unchanged. She cited Megan Torrance of Forbes Travel Guide, a speaker at her summit, on the need to adapt those standards as different generations move through the workforce. She also pointed to a shift in loyalty. Where an associate once spent thirty or forty years with a single brand, her peers are curious to move between properties, countries and brands. Staying more than five years in one company, she noted, has almost started to look unusual.

Why a 'generation translator' would backfire

Simone raised an idea he had heard at a revenue-management event in London, where the talk had turned from spreadsheets to generations, that the industry might one day need generation translators. Guérin found the concept interesting but pushed back on it. People do take on that bridging role naturally, she said, usually those with a foot in both worlds who understand how each lives and works, and transmission between ages is essential in a business that serves guests of every age.

Making it an official job is where she parted from the idea. Name a formal generational translator, and you emphasise the difference between the groups, framing them as two camps that need a moderator in between. That, she argued, would widen the gap rather than close it. Far better for someone to step into the in-between organically, mixing Gen Z with the generation before without anyone declaring it a role. Simone conceded the point.

Hard workers who also need a breather

Guérin is wary of generational stereotypes, and she took one on directly. The cliché is that younger people want meaning and balance rather than a career, while hospitality runs on long hours and stress. Her answer is that hospitality is about people first, which means looking after the employees too, and that this is something her generation has brought with it.

Her peers are hard workers, she insisted, with a real appetite to learn, but they also need psychological safety and the occasional breather, and both make them better at the job rather than worse. Burnout and endless hours do not produce good service, or a good impression of a brand. She rejects the lazy version of the story, that Gen Z does not want to work and only wants remote days and short shifts. The students around her, she said, are overachievers, quick to react and used to being stimulated constantly, for better and for worse.

The smile is what they come for

The interview closed on the HumanX theme, technology and humanity as a combination rather than a contest. Guérin's example came from her own summit, where a senior figure from the concierge world described using AI to clear the generic, time-consuming tasks so that he could spend more time face to face with guests. That, she said, is the combination working as it should.

Hospitality is not going to become a fully digital industry, because at its core it is about people, and that is what guests come through the door to find. They want the experience and the smile, and they want someone who reads the cues, the guest who has had a long trip and wants a quick check-in, or the one who wants to talk. AI is here to stay, she said, so the task is to use it to our advantage and let it complement the human work rather than stand in for it.