Chapter 5 - Devi Virdi

Devi is Head of Diversity & Inclusion at Women in Hospitality & Travel-Tech, now RaizUp, and supports the partners across travel-tech sectors in building their strategies and embedding D&I initiatives for the development and delivery of their global diversity & inclusion roadmap. Devi was recently awarded as a Top 50 Women in Travel Industry by WiNiT at the Global Business Travel Association for her work in driving Diversity & Inclusion at the industry level.

With over 22 years of experience in the hospitality and tech industry across sales, marketing, HR, operations, she believes being dynamic, bold, and courageous in today’s business environment is key to achieving lasting success. With a background in HR, her career has taken her to several global hotel chains starting out in HR as an HR Manager then pivoting to commercial roles with Starwood and AccorHotels where she led the Global Sales Business travel team successfully to a tech organization, HRS, as Managing Director Northern Europe where she led the organization’s first D&I strategy and people functions across the region. D&I has been a key commitment across all her roles to date.

Devi sits on a number of UK and Global committees; part of the LEVEL UK Advisory Board, she is an advocate for creating a level playing field to support gender balance in the UK travel industry as well as co supporting the D&I committee with TAMS; the Travel and Meetings Society in business travel.

Originally from Hong Kong, with both Indian and Chinese heritage, she studied in Australia and has been in the UK for over 22 years, giving her great insight into cross-cultural and cross-regional nuances and has supported her across leading global regions successfully in her roles. She now lives in Greater London with her family and two young children.