Rachel Alday is a hospitality entrepreneur, author, and Co-CEO of Abode Luxury Rentals, an aspirational, boutique luxury hospitality brand redefining the mountain vacation experience. Born and raised in Chicago, she began her career in corporate marketing before following her instincts west to Park City, where she fell in love with the mountains, the community, and her future husband and business partner, Rob Alday.

In 2008, at the height of the financial crisis, Rachel and Rob made what some might have called a questionable decision: they started a luxury vacation rental company. While others were pulling back, they chose to build. Their vision was simple but ambitious, to create a brand that paired elevated homes and refined service with genuine warmth, transparency, and long-term stewardship. Nearly two decades later, Abode has grown into a respected multi-market company with more than 50 employees, known for design-forward homes, deeply personalized guest experiences, and trusted homeowner partnerships.

Rachel believes hospitality is not about perfection, it’s about presence. She writes and speaks about leadership through the lens of care, clarity, and boundaries, challenging the idea that luxury has to feel cold or transactional. Her forthcoming book explores how the principles of true hospitality can reshape modern leadership and culture.

At home in Park City, Rachel and Rob are raising their three children, Bear, Major, and Annabel, teaching them that building something beautiful also means taking care of the people and places around you.

Click here to pre-order "Please Do Disturb" on Amazon!

Stan Kozlowski has spent more than 25 years doing one thing exceptionally well: getting hotel deals done. As founder and principal of CooperWynn Capital, he has closed over 80 transactions representing more than $2.5 billion in volume — spanning acquisitions, ground-up development, complex restructurings, senior and mezzanine debt, private equity placements, and strategic asset sales.

Before launching CooperWynn, Stan built his expertise across a remarkably diverse array of firms that touched nearly every corner of the hospitality capital markets. From institutional private equity at Glenmont Capital Management and investment banking at CBRE Hotels Finance, to co-founding his own boutique at Forestpark Capital Advisors and serving as a principal at Neptune Hospitality Advisors — with earlier stops at HVS International, Sonnenblick-Goldman, Hotel Partners, and Insignia ESG — Stan has seen this business from virtually every angle.

Over the course of his career, Stan has worked on transactions that span the full breadth of the industry: development financing for the Courtyard Chelsea in Manhattan, restructuring the Le Meridien Cancun, asset management of the Waldorf Astoria in Park City, ground-up development of three My Place Hotels across Arizona and Idaho, over $103 million in financing for Pinnacle Hotels USA, and mezzanine construction debt on the Residence Inn
San Diego — among many others. Stan is a Cornell School of Hotel Administration graduate with a concentration in real estate and finance, and a licensed real estate broker in Utah. He lives and works in Park City, where CooperWynn continues to close deals in markets across all 50 states and the Caribbean.

Bill Browning is one of the green building and real estate industry’s foremost thinkers and strategists, and an advocate for sustainable design solutions at all levels of business, government, and civil society. His expertise has been sought out by organizations as diverse as Fortune 500 companies, leading universities, non-profit organizations, the U.S. military, and foreign governments.

Early in his career, Bill helped build Buckminster Fuller’s last experimental structure. In 1991, he founded Green Development Services at the Rocky Mountain Institute, an entrepreneurial, non-profit “think and do tank”. His consulting projects at RMI included new towns, resorts, building renovations, and high-profile demonstration projects including Wal-Mart’s Eco-mart, the Greening of the White House, the National Aquarium, Disney Hong Kong, the Pentagon, Lucas Film, Grand Canyon National Park and the Sydney 2000 Olympic Village. In 1999 Green Development Services was awarded the President’s Council for Sustainable Development/Renew America Prize.

Beginning in 2004, Bill was the Director of Design and Environment for Haymount, a New Urbanist community in Virginia. In this capacity he led the development’s site planning, authored a set of design guidelines, and guided development of innovative infrastructure systems. In 2005 he co-founded Browning+Bannon LLC, an independent real estate and consulting firm focused on environmentally responsive development.

Bill was a founding member of the U.S. Green Building Council’s Board of Directors, and served as Chair of USGBC’s Governance Committee. Over the years Bill has served on the Boards of Greening America, the Colorado Alliance for Environmental Education, RealEnergy, the Roaring Fork Conservancy, and ioby. He has also served on The Nature Conservancy Real Estate Advisory Council, ASTM Green Building Rating Committee, and the Department of Defense’s Science Board Energy Task Force, the AIA National Committee on the Environment, the Department of State’s Overseas Building Office Advisory Council, the Real Estate Advisory Council for the Trust for Public Land, the Interface “Green Dream Team.” He is a GSA national peer, and editorial advisor for Environmental Building News, Environmental Design & Construction Magazine, and Green @ Work.

In addition to consulting, Bill writes and lectures widely on sustainable design and building practices. He is a co-author of Green Development: Integrating Ecology and Real Estate; A Primer on Sustainable Building; Greening the Building and the Bottom Line; and Biophilic Design; The Economics of Biophilia and Midcentury (un)Modern. He has published articles in Architectural Record, Progressive Architecture, Urban Land, and AIA’s Environmental Resource Guide. His work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Elle and Popular Science, among others, and he has been interviewed by NPR, CNN, and PBS.

Bill received a Bachelor’s degree in Environmental Design from the University of Colorado, specializing in energy-conscious architecture and resource management. He holds a Master of Science in Real Estate Development from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was awarded the MIT Center for Real Estate’s 1991 Public-Sector Fellowship, and, in 1995, the Charles H. Spaulding Award. In 1998 Bill was named one of five people “Making a Difference” by Buildings magazine. In 2001 he was selected as an honorary member of the American Institute of Architects, and in 2004 he was honored with the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership Award.

In 2006, Bill founded Terrapin with longtime partners Bob Fox, Rick Cook and Chris Garvin to craft high-performance environmental strategies for corporations, governments, and large-scale real estate developments. Our diverse clients include Cacique Resort in Costa Rica, Starwood’s Element hotel brand, NRDC, PNB Malaysia, New Songdo City in Korea, InterfaceFLOR, Bank of America and the National Geographic Society. Bill is based in Washington, D.C.

Charlie Denenberg is a University of Utah finance graduate who moved into hotel management after gaining experience in front desk operations, hospitality analytics, and student leadership. A former participant in the Institute’s Utah Tourism Analytics program, he accepted the role of General Manager at Comfort Inn Fairbanks after graduation. His story shows how practical experience and professional relationships can accelerate the transition from campus to career.