In 2026 a woman runs UN Tourism for the first time. Worth marking. Worth marking too that women make eighty-five per cent of travel decisions, fill sixty per cent of the industry’s workforce, and hold seventeen per cent of its executive seats. An industry overwhelmingly staffed and shaped by women is still largely directed by men.
There’s a fairness argument here, and it’s a real one. But I want to make a different argument, because I think it’s the one that actually changes how projects get delivered, and it’s about capability.
Every tourism and hospitality project is delivered by a team, and the quality of the delivery is capped by the quality of that team. That’s not a slogan; it’s the single most reliable predictor I know. The best plan in the world, executed by a team that’s under-resourced, poorly led or missing key capability, delivers a poor outcome. A modest plan executed by an excellent team usually delivers a good one. People are the delivery mechanism, and in hospitality more than most, they are the product.
Which is why the seventeen per cent figure should trouble anyone who cares about delivery, not just anyone who cares about equity. An industry that develops most of its workforce but promotes a fraction of one demographic into leadership is systematically failing to convert capability into authority. It’s building talent and then not using it at the level where it counts most. From a pure delivery standpoint, that’s waste: capability developed, then left on the table.
I’ve led enough teams to know that the difference between a project that delivers and one that struggles is very often the strength of the bench beneath the leader. And you don’t build a strong bench by developing people and then capping how far they can rise. You build it by finding capability wherever it sits and moving it to where it has the most effect. An organisation that overlooks most of its own talent pool for leadership isn’t being unfair so much as being inefficient, and inefficiency in your people shows up directly in what you deliver.
So for anyone leading delivery in this industry, the leadership gap translates into some concrete practices.
Build the team from the whole talent pool, not the familiar corner of it. The best person for a delivery role is often not the obvious one, and an organisation that keeps promoting from the same narrow group is choosing from a fraction of its available capability. That’s a self-inflicted constraint on the quality of every team you assemble.
Develop capability with a path attached. Training people who then hit a ceiling wastes the training and loses the people. In hospitality, where turnover is already a chronic delivery risk, a visible path from the floor to leadership is a retention mechanism, and retention is what keeps institutional knowledge inside the project instead of walking out the door mid-delivery.
And understand the market through the people who represent it. A leadership team that mirrors the market it serves reads that market more accurately. When women make most travel decisions, a delivery team with women in its senior ranks brings insight into the customer that a homogenous team has to guess at. That insight shapes better product decisions, which is a delivery advantage, not a diversity checkbox.
The appointment at UN Tourism is a signal that the ceiling is starting to move. For delivery leads, the lesson underneath the headline is more immediate: your project is only as good as the team behind it, and a team drawn from a fraction of the available talent is a team you’ve weakened before you’ve begun. The industry’s leadership gap is, among other things, a capability the sector keeps developing and declining to use.
So the question for anyone assembling a delivery team: are you choosing from all your talent, or just the part of it you’re used to promoting? Because one of those builds a strong bench, and the other quietly caps what you can deliver.
Related: The backbone everyone forgets to design for and Overtourism is a stakeholder you forgot to count.
Ben Webb is an award-winning project leader and delivery strategist. He was named Australian Institute of Project Management Project Manager of the Year in 2022 and nominated for the IPMA World Project Manager of the Year in 2023.
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