DUCO Turned Paris Into a Stage for the World’s Finest Hotels

 Your next vacation may get its first outing at a meeting you will never attend. Long before the suite is reserved and the itinerary lands in your inbox, a travel advisor has to work out which hotel, which local specialist and which version of a destination will actually suit you. In Paris this week, a few hundred of the people who make those calls are in the same city, at the same tables, comparing notes. You won’t be there (none of us travelers are invited, which is rather the point), but you may well feel the results the next time you ask for a suite with a view, a table that “can’t” be booked or something you haven’t already seen on Instagram.

The gathering belongs to DUCO Travel Summit, which Carolina Perez founded in 2016 on a premise so sensible it’s almost surprising it needed inventing: the people recommending a destination should actually know it, and the people opening its doors. Its sixth French edition, “Le Grand Spectacle,” runs in Paris from November 2 to 6, 2026, and it arrives at a particularly interesting moment, with Rebeca Pinheiro newly installed as President and Partner. More on her in a moment.

First, the spectacle.

Photo Credit: DUCO Travel Summit

Le Grand Spectacle

For a summit named after a show, DUCO wasn’t about to open in a conference room. The week began on November 2 at the Théâtre du Lido on the Champs-Élysées, where the Opening Celebration and DUCO France Awards were hosted by Accor and Orient Express. (If you’re going to hand out hospitality awards in Paris, a cabaret with decades of feathers behind it is about as on-theme as it gets.)

The awards cover four categories: Best Hotelier; Unique Experience Provider; Hôtel de Charme, for properties with up to 50 rooms; and Emblématique Maison, for those with 51 rooms or more. What I like about them is who gets a say. Travel advisors nominate their preferred suppliers, and attendees vote on the winners, so the recognition comes from inside the very relationships the summit exists to build. It’s the hospitality equivalent of being voted best dressed by the people who actually know how much the dress cost.

• Best Hotelier: Gorka Bergareche, Area Vice President of Operations, Luxury Hotels EAME, and General Manager, Park Hyatt Paris-Vendôme
• Unique Experience Provider: Orient Express Yachts
• Hôtel de Charme: Domaine Les Crayères
• Emblématique Maison: Hôtel Martinez, Cannes

I’m also rather fond of the split between Hôtel de Charme and Emblématique Maison. It acknowledges what anyone who travels well already knows: a 20-room hideaway in the countryside and a grand Parisian palace are entirely different propositions, and each deserves to be judged on its own terms.

Giving experience providers their own category is just as smart. A hotel may be the reason you pick a destination, but the days around it decide how much of that destination you actually get to know. The person who arranges a private after-hours visit or a morning with a winemaker has a very different job from the person who greets you at reception, and a trip that feels effortless usually has both of them (and several others you never meet) quietly working behind it.

For the advisors in the room, the ceremony does something more practical, too. It puts names and faces to the businesses they’ll spend the rest of the week discussing. A hotel is far easier to sell when you’ve shaken hands with the person responsible for it, and an introduction made over champagne at the Lido has a way of turning into a much longer conversation by Thursday.

Photo Credit: DUCO Travel Summit

What Makes DUCO Different

Plenty of industry events put hotels and buyers in the same room. DUCO’s twist is focus. Each summit is devoted to a single destination (or a natural pairing, as with Spain & Portugal), and it’s invitation-only on both sides of the table. This year that meant 200 high-end hospitality professionals and experience providers meeting 180 travel advisors, considered the top sellers in their markets and drawn mainly from the English-speaking world.

The French edition makes a broad case for what “France” means. Alongside the Parisian palaces and Provençal vineyards and the cobblestoned villages in between, the summit spotlights France’s overseas territories: Saint Martin and Saint Barthélemy in the Caribbean, and French Polynesia in the South Pacific. Exhibitors include members of The Leading Hotels of the World, Relais & Châteaux, Preferred Hotels & Resorts and Small Luxury Hotels of the World, along with DMCs, cruise lines, private jet operators and the kind of bespoke experience providers who make a trip memorable.

It’s that mix of the iconic and the up-and-coming that interests me most. Any advisor can recommend the hotel everyone has heard of. The ones worth paying for know the small, new place that will end up being the highlight of your trip, and they know its owner well enough to call them.

Then there’s the setting. DUCO doesn’t just talk about French hospitality; it makes its guests live in it. Registration and the press program were held at Hôtel de Crillon, A Rosewood Hotel. Three days of face-to-face appointments run at Shangri-La Paris, the former palace of Prince Roland Bonaparte, which also hosts the DUCO Apéritif, poured with wines from Château Carqueiranne. Wednesday’s Networking Cocktail moves to InterContinental Paris Le Grand. It is, I’d argue, the most persuasive case for continuing education I’ve come across.

The support runs deep, too. Choose Paris Region has backed the summit as Destination Partner since its first French edition. “Over six years, the event has become a benchmark for luxury travel,” says Baptiste Orlandini, CEO of Choose Paris Region, calling the region “a living stage where every visit becomes an emotion and every stay a story worth telling.” Considering the theme, he had his line ready.

Photo Credit: DUCO Travel Summit

France Beyond the Familiar Addresses

Devoting an entire edition to one country gives its less obvious corners room to breathe. Paris may be the meeting point, but the conversation can drift from Provence to the Caribbean without ever leaving the French portfolio. For an advisor planning several trips a year for the same client, that’s gold: someone who has fallen for one version of French hospitality is usually ready to be seduced by another.

This is where the smaller properties earn their place. The traveler who has already done the grand hotels (and many of these clients have, more than once) is often looking for a different rhythm on the next visit: fewer rooms, a more intimate setting, somewhere that becomes the reason to visit a region rather than a place to sleep while there. A room full of established names and emerging ones gives those conversations somewhere to happen, and gives advisors the chance to ask the questions a beautiful photograph can’t answer.

Who would feel most at home here? How long should they really stay? And what, exactly, should they do once they’ve finished admiring the room? They sound like ordinary questions. Get them wrong on a five-figure trip and they become very expensive ones.

Then there are the destination management companies, the people who turn a wish list into something that actually works on the ground. An advisor may know precisely which hotel suits a client; the local partner knows how to fill the days around it, who to call for the impossible reservation and how long the drive to that vineyard really takes. Put both in the same circle and a trip starts to feel coherent from the first transfer to the last. The suite is lovely, of course. Getting everything else right is the part people remember.

Photo Credit: DUCO Travel Summit

The City Is Part of the Program

The press program runs on the same logic. Eighteen international media contributors and French journalists joined the three-day schedule, with the international contingent hosted by SAX Paris. A welcome dinner at SO/ Paris preceded the meetings at Hôtel de Crillon, and the final day took in an activity at SAX Paris, a visit to Shangri-La Paris and a farewell lunch and wellness experience hosted by CARITA Paris.

It’s a clever edit of the city. A dinner, a hotel meeting and a facial each reveal something different about how a guest might actually spend time in Paris, and together they make the case for the destination far more convincingly than any one property could alone. For journalists covering hospitality, it’s context. For Paris, it’s a much bigger story than a single address.

The evening events aren’t just a reward for sitting through appointments, either. A meeting has a beginning and an end; a conversation over an apéritif has room to wander. Someone can explain what a property has planned, ask what clients have been requesting lately or pick up the thread of a subject that deserved more time that afternoon. The surroundings are glamorous, certainly. But there’s a reason the cocktail hour sits on the working schedule and not after it.

DUCO keeps the community connected once the glasses are cleared, too, sharing destination inspiration and regional highlights through its digital channels year-round, while its app handles networking, scheduling and event information during the summit. Useful, for an event whose entire value depends on people being able to find one another again.

Photo Credit: DUCO Travel Summit

A New Name at the Top

Which brings us to Pinheiro. In August, DUCO announced its acquisition by an entrepreneurial investment fund led by Pinheiro and backed by a group of investors, with Pinheiro taking over day-to-day operations as President and Partner. She brings international business and leadership experience and an academic background from MIT, and, crucially for a business built entirely on relationships, a stated commitment not to break what works.

“My priority is to preserve what makes DUCO unique while supporting the talented team that has earned the trust of our partners around the world,” Pinheiro says. “Our goal is to bring the same commitment to relationships and destination immersion to every new market we enter.”

It’s the right instinct. The hotels and advisors who return to DUCO year after year do so because of the people they deal with, so it matters that the existing team stays fully in place and that partners keep their established contacts. Perez isn’t going anywhere, either. She retains a stake in the company and stays on as a strategic board advisor, focused on new destinations and long-term strategy.

“I feel incredibly fortunate to have found a leader who shares this vision, has earned my complete confidence, and is deeply committed to preserving DUCO’s identity,” Perez says. For a founder handing over the business she built, that’s a strong endorsement.

And the map is already growing. DUCO Italy, which began in Florence in 2018 before moving to Milan in 2024, heads to Rome in 2027. DUCO Spain & Portugal has called Marbella home since 2025. And 2027 also brings the debut of DUCO UK & Ireland in London, which, given how many of DUCO’s advisors come from English-speaking markets, feels a little overdue.

Photo Credit: DUCO Travel Summit

Growth With Familiar Faces

Pinheiro’s real challenge is a delicate one: taking a very personal business somewhere bigger without making it feel any less personal. A carefully curated gathering works because of its scale and its attention to detail, from who gets invited to how the participants fit together to whether the destination is given the time it deserves. Every new edition brings new places into that circle, and with them the responsibility to keep the introductions just as good.

The way the roles have been divided helps. Pinheiro runs operations with the established team; Perez keeps an eye on the longer view, including where DUCO goes next. For returning partners, that continuity means more than a familiar name on an org chart. It means still dealing with the people who understand their property, their market and exactly what they hope to get out of the week.

London will give the UK and Ireland a stage of their own, while Rome hands the Italian edition, which started in Florence and later moved to Milan, its third backdrop. (Few cities do spectacle quite like Rome, so Paris has set a high bar for itself.) Each new host city brings its own way of welcoming people, and the destination stays the organizing principle. I’m curious to see how each one interprets the invitation.

Photo Credit: DUCO Travel Summit

Why Travelers Should Care

None of this happens in front of the people who eventually pack the suitcases. But it shows up later: in a recommendation that turns out to be just right, an introduction that gets you a better table, or a hotel picked because your advisor has met the general manager and knows it suits you.

You may never know that a conversation in Paris shaped your trip. You’ll just notice that it went remarkably well.

Read More

Planning your own spectacle? Browse Haute Living’s latest luxury travel coverage, and see the full list of 2026 DUCO France Awards nominees.