Leadership series: Joao Serio

You went from bartender at The Mandeville Hotel in Mayfair to Group CEO of Boo Boo Laand. Walk us through that journey — what's the thread connecting bar service, luxury F&B operations, and now family entertainment?

The history is that I've spent my whole career on the floor of five-star hospitality, and I've never believed that standard should belong only to adults with a cocktail in hand. 

Working The Mandeville, then luxury F&B  across the world, taught me what genuine five-star service actually is — anticipation, warmth, and precision, delivered so well the guest never sees the mechanics behind it. 

When I looked at Boo Boo Laand I saw a brand trying to do exactly that in the family entertainment, instead of settling  for 'fun and functional' Boo Boo Laand is what happens when you refuse to lower the service standard just because your guest is eight years old and your beverage of choice is a slushie.

You've run nightlife venues (The Arts Club, STK Ibiza, Catch Dubai), beach clubs (COVEBEACH) and multi-outlet hospitality groups (Rise Hospitality). How different are the fundamentals of those businesses from running a family entertainment brand, and what stays exactly the same?

What stays exactly the same is the belief that hospitality is a craft, not a checklist — staffing structure, P&L rigor, and a real obsession with how a guest feels the moment they walk in, whether that's The Arts Club or a Boo Boo Laand venue. 

What's different is what I'd call the foundation the five-star experience sits on. In nightlife or a beach club, the guest is an adult choosing to spend hours and money on indulgence. 

In family entertainment, safety is the non-negotiable floor before hospitality can even begin — you earn the right to deliver a five-star experience only once the safety standard is absolute. 

So the ambition is the same, five-star throughout, but here it's built on a foundation those other businesses never had to engineer.

F&B sat at the centre of almost every role before this one. How central is food and beverage to the Boo Boo Laand experience, and how does your thinking change when the guest is a child rather than a diner or a drinker?

F&B is still central, but its job has changed. In luxury hospitality, F&B was often the experience itself. 

At Boo Boo Laand, F&B is one instrument in a bigger five-star composition — it has to be excellent, but it's in service of the whole visit, not the centrepiece of it. 

And the guest calculus flips: the person eating isn't the person deciding whether this was a five-star experience — the parent is. 

So my thinking shifts from 'how do we delight the person ordering' to 'how do we make the parent feel this was worth their trust and their money,' 

What's the biggest operational difference between running a beach club or bar, where the guest chooses to stay for hours, and running a family entertainment venue, where the trip is driven by kids, safety and repeat visits?

In a beach club, you're managing an adult's leisure time and your commercial lever is dwell time and spend. 

In family entertainment, you're managing a child's attention span, a parent's anxiety threshold, and a safety standard, simultaneously, and you're doing it while still trying to deliver the polish and warmth of a five-star stay. 

That's the operational difference that matters most to me: 

Luxury family entertainment is one of the fastest-growing categories in the GCC right now. What's driving that demand, and how long do you think this growth cycle has left to run?

Part of it is demographic — a young population, high disposable income, a climate that pushes families indoors for much of the year. 

But the deeper driver is that GCC families increasingly expect the same standard of experience across every part of their life, including where they take their kids on a Tuesday afternoon. 

They've been trained by five-star hotels and premium retail to expect that standard everywhere, and family entertainment hadn't caught up.

I think the category will evolve to a more 5 star experience and the opeartors that trully embrace it and deliver will manage to continue its run, the FEC world will never stop to be relevant, it just depends on how you wish to deliver it.

Talent and retention are constant issues across bars and F&B. How does that challenge change when you move into a business where you're also hiring for safety-critical, childcare-adjacent roles at scale?

In luxury hospitality, you're training people to deliver warmth and precision. Here, you need that same calibre of person, but they also have to be trusted with a child's safety every single shift — so the hiring bar goes up on both dimensions at once, not one instead of the other. 

That's a harder recruiting problem than most of the industry is solving for, because a lot of operators hire for safety and hope service quality follows, or hire for charm and hope safety discipline follows. 

I want both from day one, which means investing far more in training than a typical business ever needs.

As Boo Boo Laand expands into new markets, how do you keep the brand and the guest experience consistent when the culture, the mall, and the customer are all different?

We standardize the things a five-star guest experience actually depends on — training standards, service choreography, a guest experience score we track quantitatively across every venue — and we deliberately localize everything else: pricing, F&B, programming, even parts of the design. 

Consistency, to me, isn't about every venue looking identical, it's about a parent in Mumbai and a parent in Dubai both feeling the same thing when they walk in: this was built to a standard, not thrown together.

What's your long-term vision for Boo Boo Laand, and what would "mission accomplished" look like for this chapter of your career?

My vision is that Boo Boo Laand becomes the proof point that family entertainment and five-star hospitality aren't separate categories — that a family can get the same calibre of care and craft taking their kids out for the afternoon that they'd get checking into a great hotel. 

The portfolio is the vehicle, not the point. Mission accomplished will be when Boo Boo Laand becomes a name that families trust across three or more continents, not because we planted flags but because we never compromised the time a child spends inside our doors, wherever those doors happen to be. 

That is the mission — not to be everywhere, but to be the one a family chooses, on purpose, in any city we call home.

What do you see as the biggest challenges currently facing the landscape where you are, and how should/will a business like yours respond?

The biggest challenge is that the category is growing fast enough to attract operators who see 'family entertainment' as a real estate and footfall play rather than a hospitality discipline — and that dilutes what families come to expect from the category. 

Our response is to hold the line on the five-star standard even when it's operationally harder and more expensive than the commodity alternative, because that standard is the actual differentiator, not the square footage.

How do you prioritise tasks when everything feels like a priority?

I ask which of these things actually protects the guest experience or the safety standard if it slips, and which is just noise. 

Everything gets triaged against that filter before anything else — a supplier delay that threatens an opening date matters more than an email that feels urgent but touches neither guest experience nor safety. 

It's a simple filter, but it keeps the five-star standard from quietly eroding under operational pressure, which is the easiest thing in this business to let happen without noticing.

What values or behaviours do you consider essential for leadership teams today?

A genuine hospitality instinct — caring what the guest feels, not just what the numbers say — combined with ownership without ego, and honesty about bad news early.