Alessandro Dorrucci, General Manager of the Year 2026 at Grand Hotel del Mare

Alessandro Dorrucci — General Manager of the Year 2026 © European Hotel Awards 2026

A great resort asks its General Manager to lead several hospitality worlds at once. Rooms, restaurants, spa, beach, pools, gardens, events and personalised service each have their own operating rhythm. At Grand Hotel del Mare Resort & Spa in Bordighera, Alessandro Dorrucci has built his leadership around making those different worlds feel like one coherent house, earning him General Manager of the Year 2026 at the European Hotel Awards.

Alessandro Dorrucci, General Manager of Grand Hotel del Mare Resort & Spa, received the General Manager of the Year 2026 distinction. The recognition focuses on leadership able to preserve the personality of a distinctive Mediterranean property while coordinating the complexity required to deliver a fluid guest experience.

A Mediterranean resort with many guest journeys

Grand Hotel del Mare occupies a particular position on the Italian Riviera. Its gardens, seafront setting, private beach, pools, wellness facilities, restaurants and reception spaces create a resort in which guests can move between very different experiences without leaving the property.

For management, that diversity is both an asset and a challenge. Every department works to a different rhythm, yet the guest expects one standard and one personality. The General Manager’s role is to create the common direction that allows each team to remain specialised without becoming isolated.

Grand Hotel del Mare Resort & Spa combines accommodation, gardens, leisure and the Mediterranean in one resort environment © Grand Hotel del Mare Resort & Spa

Protecting character while keeping the house contemporary

The hotel has a strong visual identity shaped by art, decorative objects, traditional furnishings and the atmosphere of a grand Mediterranean residence. That character is part of the reason guests remember the property, but it also creates a management responsibility: renewal must improve comfort and service without erasing what makes the house recognisable.

Dorrucci’s leadership therefore operates between preservation and evolution. A resort cannot live on atmosphere alone; it needs contemporary standards, trained teams, reliable systems and the ability to adapt to international expectations. The challenge is to modernise the experience while keeping the soul of the property legible.

Architecture, gardens and resort life form part of the distinctive identity Alessandro Dorrucci is responsible for preserving and developing © Grand Hotel del Mare Resort & Spa

Leadership through coordination rather than visibility

The quality of a General Manager is often most evident in transitions: the moment a guest arrives before a room is ready, a restaurant reservation changes, an event overlaps with leisure activity, weather affects the beach operation or an unexpected request needs several departments to respond together.

These moments reveal whether the hotel shares information effectively and whether teams understand the same service culture. Strong leadership makes the complexity disappear from the guest’s view. The aim is not for management to be visible everywhere, but for the organisation it creates to be felt everywhere.

The resort’s relationship with gardens, sea and outdoor life gives the house a personality that management must translate into consistent service © Grand Hotel del Mare Resort & Spa

Why Alessandro Dorrucci received General Manager of the Year 2026

The European Hotel Awards Board selected Alessandro Dorrucci because his leadership brings together four dimensions that are essential in a complex luxury resort: preservation of the property’s identity, operational discipline, team cohesion and personalised attention to the guest.

The Award recognises his ability to make accommodation, food and beverage, wellness, private beach, gardens and events function as parts of the same hospitality proposition. That coherence is especially significant in a property whose personality is too strong to be managed through a generic resort formula.

The Board also considered the human dimension of his role. A General Manager sets standards, but those standards become real only when teams understand and share them. Dorrucci’s distinction therefore reflects a form of leadership measured not simply by the performance of individual departments, but by the consistency with which the whole house receives its guests.

The host hotel as a live demonstration of hospitality

Grand Hotel del Mare also hosted the eighth European Hotel Awards on 28 September 2026. For Dorrucci and his teams, the event placed the hotel’s operating culture under unusual pressure: international arrivals, media activity, cocktail service, ceremony, gala dinner and the expectations of hospitality professionals all converged in a single day.

That context gives the distinction an additional relevance. The same skills recognised by the Award — anticipation, coordination, attention and the ability to keep a complex experience coherent — were also the skills required to host the European hospitality community in Bordighera.

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European Hotel Awards 2026 Partners

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