Beyond the Beautiful Site: Lisette Acosta Álvarez Takes on Majestic Hospitality’s Regional Expansion

Her appointment and a new affiliation with LaCosta Advisors bring investment strategy and local knowledge together across Latin America and the Caribbean.

A beautiful site can make a hospitality project easy to imagine. Making it work requires a different kind of vision.

Before the first guest arrives, someone must connect the destination’s appeal with financial feasibility, development requirements and the realities of operating there. It is detailed work, often far removed from the images that eventually sell the experience.

That intersection sits at the heart of Lisette Acosta Álvarez’s new role as Director, Latin America & the Caribbean at Majestic Hospitality. Announced on October 14, her appointment accompanies an affiliate partnership with LaCosta Advisors, the hospitality investment advisory firm she founded. She succeeds Andrew Cohan, who is retiring, and will oversee regional expansion alongside existing business interests and relationships.

A Career Connecting Investment With Place

Acosta Álvarez brings experience that crosses tourism, infrastructure and investment strategy.

Her background includes serving as commercial manager at Juan Santamaría International Airport and sitting on the board of the Papagayo Gulf Tourism Project. She holds a Global MBA from INCAE and completed Cornell University’s hotel real estate investment training programme.

Her International Society of Hospitality Consultants profile also documents more than 20 years of experience and a previous role as Tourism Infrastructure Sector Manager at CINDE, where she developed strategies to attract international investment into Costa Rica’s hospitality and real estate sectors.

Together, those experiences offer a perspective that extends beyond an individual property. They connect the investment decision with the destination that must support it.

What the LaCosta Affiliation Brings

Majestic describes the LaCosta Advisors affiliation as establishing its second overseas office. LaCosta works with investors, owners and developers to identify opportunities, define strategy and advance hospitality and real estate projects through international perspective and local market intelligence.

Majestic’s published services include feasibility and site analysis, market assessment, financial projections, asset positioning, and brand and management selection.

For prospective clients, the relevance lies in how these capabilities can work together. An attractive concept needs to survive questions about its audience, development costs and operating assumptions. Local knowledge helps those questions become more specific—and the answers more useful.

The announcement establishes the affiliation and leadership responsibilities. It does not disclose transaction values or a new project pipeline.

The Questions Behind a Compelling Project

The most useful advisory conversations often begin where the presentation becomes less comfortable.

Who will visit outside peak season? How will guests reach the property? Can the destination support the staffing and services the concept requires? Does the proposed experience justify its operating costs and intended price?

These questions deserve attention while changes are still possible.

A development can be visually convincing and commercially unresolved. Equally, a promising destination may need a concept shaped around its particular strengths rather than one borrowed from somewhere else.

Acosta Álvarez’s stated approach reflects that relationship between performance and place. In the appointment announcement, she describes investors seeking projects that suit their markets, perform financially and contribute lasting value to their destinations.

From an Idea to an Operating Business

An appointment cannot establish what future projects will achieve. It can reveal the experience a company is choosing to place behind its ambitions.

For Majestic, Acosta Álvarez’s arrival brings a background spanning investment attraction, infrastructure and hospitality advisory into its regional leadership. The LaCosta affiliation adds another channel through which that knowledge can inform development decisions.

The work ahead will happen through individual sites, owners and projects—each with its own constraints and possibilities.

For an investor looking across a beautiful piece of land, the valuable advisor is the person who can see both the promise and the questions that still need answering.