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However, things were never easy for the CEO. ere was a lot of bootstrapping involved with getting his business off the ground and ultimately, he raised a lot of money from friends and family. In the beginning, Hentschel worked out of his Southern California apartment, essentially doubling as the company's 24/7 support. But that's just the sort of tenacity you have to have when starting a business, and Hentschel always knew that. Today, HotelPlanner is 100 percent employee-owned and has completed arrangements for over 5 million groups (about 4,000 groups a day during the weekdays). He attributes the success they've had to a combination of technology and people, and because of all the groups they've worked with, their system's AI brain is able to forecast rates and identify the right properties. Recently, he and HotelPlanner hosted the European Group Travel Awards in Berlin, and Hentschel himself was named Innovator of the year by Cornell. I caught up with the HotelPlanner CEO, who is now based in London, to learn more about his background, business acumen and perspective on hospitality. You're someone I would classify as having the "entrepreneurial gene." Did you always know you would be an innovator? What was it like growing up? I definitely did. I was raised by two parents who were both entrepreneurs. I was adopted, so I came into my family. As a child, I was living in a car in South Central with a single mom, became a ward of the state, then was adopted by my parents in Bel Air. We moved to Hawaii for a bit where my parents were developing a hotel so I was there for grade school. en they started buying hotels in Carmel, CA when I was in high school, and eventually I moved out east for college at Cornell. My father was an executive with Hyatt for 15 years and le to start developing and running his own hotels. He owned as many as four hotels in California at one point. My mother, she didn't even go to college but she started her company from nothing at the time. She was involved in a tour operation business when she was working for British Caledonian, they were taking calls from Europeans that wanted to do a full-package trip into the U.S. where everything was included. She was looking around trying to direct them to somebody but there wasn't anybody doing that, so she thought, 'Wow I'm getting so many calls with all this interest, I should supply that.' at's when she started her company, American Tours International. It grew into quite a big company, bringing POINT OF VUE V U E N J . C O M 91

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