Kempinski CEO and five senior executives exit amid turnaround doubts

Barbara Muckermann has left her post as group CEO of Kempinski Hotels after nearly two and a half years in the role. The departure is the centre of a wider upheaval: four other senior executives have also gone, and a fifth has resigned, according to multiple sources.

Chief financial officer Gordon Drake, chief human resources officer Karin Raguin, chief development officer Frank Veenstra and chief brand officer Barbara Biffi have all left the company, the sources said. Chief commercial officer Massimo Brancaleoni has resigned, though it is unclear whether he has departed yet.

The reasons behind the exits remain disputed, sources told Skift. What is not in question is where the losses cut deepest: the roles cover the functions most responsible for repositioning the Bahraini-controlled group and for financing the next stage of its expansion.

Some of the departing executives had barely settled in. Veenstra was named chief development officer in September 2025, while Biffi joined more recently still. Kempinski declined to answer detailed questions about the departures, and Muckermann declined to comment.

What the departures hit

Kempinski reported 74 hotels and residences across 33 countries in a September 30 announcement, most of them managed for independent owners rather than owned outright. That structure means the group's income rests heavily on management fees, which public filings show declined in 2024.

Two separate capital conversations are running alongside the exits. Sources said Kempinski's owners had been looking for a financial buyer, and one person familiar with the talks said some prospective buyers balked at the asking price.

At the same time, Muckermann had been in discussions with bankers and capital providers about financing further hotel acquisitions. The two tracks, one selling the group and one buying more hotels, point to a strategy unsettled at the very top.

The group has moved quickly to name replacements. Noel Attard becomes chief development officer and Andrea Vanni becomes chief financial officer, with the board presenting both appointments as continuity in the transformation rather than a change of direction.

A profitable year, with warning signs

Public filings show the group stayed in profit in 2024, with net profit rising to €17.6 million. But consolidated revenue fell to €164.6 million from €174.9 million the year before, and management-fee revenue declined alongside it.

The management report adds a sharper warning: it forecasts a sharp drop in 2025 pretax profit. That leaves the incoming finance and development chiefs steering a business whose top line and fee income were already shrinking before the exits.

Kempinski, founded in 1897 and based in Germany, runs high-end hotels and resorts across Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia, and our company page puts its portfolio at more than 75 properties. Most of those are run for owners who hold the real estate.

That reliance on independent owners makes the departure of executives in development, finance, brand and people a structural challenge rather than a single succession. Owners decide whether to sign with a operator, and development and brand chiefs are the people who persuade them.

The departures also echo what we have reported elsewhere in the C-suite: a run of recent chief executive changes across jewellery, fashion and consumer names, several tied to a sales process, as when the Biologique Recherche CEO reportedly exited as a sale began.

What sets Kempinski apart is the breadth of the exit in a single moment. Most of the successions we have covered involved one role changing hands; here the functions that define the repositioning, development, brand, people and finance, emptied out together.

With a financial sale under exploration and an acquisition plan being discussed, the board has supplied continuity in the form of Attard and Vanni. The unanswered question is who now carries the repositioning that the departed executives had been hired to deliver.

The buyers who balked at the asking price do the rest of the framing. A group seeking both a sale and acquisition financing, while its fee income falls and its 2025 profit is forecast to drop sharply, has a harder question to answer about what its value now is.

Kempinski has said nothing publicly about who leads the brand and human resources functions after the exits, nor about what the changes mean for its capital strategy. Until it does, the chief executive's chair remains the most visible empty seat at a company repositioning itself.

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This briefing is published daily using an AI-powered system crafted by Worthbury's team and finely tuned to meet our editorial standards. While we continuously test and review the output, mistakes can sometimes happen. Tell us if you spot one.

Image: Photo Credit: Exterior of the Hotel Adlon Kempinski Berlin