What the First Woman President of Celebrity Cruises Has Learned From Nearly 40 Years in the Travel Industry

23.10.2023 - 15:49 / cntraveler.com / Celebrity Cruises / Cruises

Lisa Lutoff-Perlo made headlines as the first woman president and CEO of Celebrity Cruises when she took the helm of the line in 2014. In her new memoir, Making Waves, she offers hard-won wisdom she has gathered over her nearly 40-year career in the industry, climbing her way from door-to-door cruise salesperson all the way to the C-suite.

“It’s a leadership book above all else," Lutoff-Perlo says. "It’s all of the lessons that I’ve learned along my way, from the very bottom to the very top. I want to share them in the hope that one or two or many of them will resonate with people.”

Condé Nast Traveler sat down with Lutoff-Perlo to hear more about her advice from the book, which will be released on February 20, 2024.

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You dedicate one of the chapters to “finding your superpower,” and you say that being a woman is one of yours. Can you elaborate on that?

Lisa Lutoff-Perlo: One of my superpowers that I thought was the “X factor”—the fact that I’m a woman. There’s a lot of research that shows that women leaders are different. They think differently, and they lead differently. I always found that genuine caring and empathy were something that were superpowers of mine that got a disproportionate amount of effort from the people that I had the honor and privilege of working with everyday. Especially when I think about our crew from all over the world who leave their families for so many months at a time, and many of them leave children. I wanted to be a leader that they knew genuinely cared about them.

You got a lot of attention for being the first woman CEO of Celebrity Cruises. You say in the book that it frustrated you, but you decided to “go with it.” How did you turn that into an advantage?

LLP: I worked very hard for 30 years to finally get this position as president and CEO [of Celebrity]. It was late 2014, and it was something that seems to have really resonated. My phone was ringing off the hook, and it was interesting because I didn’t think anything of it. This was the third position in the company where I was the first woman to do it. Now granted, it was the highest profile, so of course it got the most attention. I remember being a little irritated that everyone would ask me, so what does it feel like to be the first woman? I was overwhelmed by the attention I got, and I was annoyed by it because that was the focus. Then I decided that I was going to go with it, and I was going to use it to my advantage. Because the only way you can make a difference is if you have a platform or a voice. It certainly helped Celebrity, which was always at the top of my list of things to do.

Right before Covid-19 became a global pandemic, there