Larry Mogelonsky, MBA, P. Eng.
Hotel Strategist, Asset Manager, Marketer, and Public Speaker
Early Career
Larry Mogelonsky earned an Honors Bachelor of Engineering degree from Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, followed by a Master of Business Administration from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. He holds Professional Engineering accreditations in the provinces of Ontario and Quebec.
After working for several years as a civil engineer, seven years in brand management at Procter & Gamble, and a year at Pepsico for the Frito Lay division, he was ready for a change.
Larry next moved to the service side of the business world, spending several years at Bozell Canada, which was considered among the world’s top ten advertising agencies at the time. As a managing director, he created the agency’s hospitality and travel division, which held Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, Howard Johnson’s, and American Airlines as clients.
LMA Communications Inc.
It was the era of giant agency mergers, though, so Larry decided to establish his own company, founding LMA Communications Inc. in January 1991.
His new agency had a single-minded goal—to apply the strategic marketing principles that he had learned to the hospitality industry. He never thought of it as a ’Toronto’ agency, as doing so would limit both creativity and opportunity. Rather, the mantra was to be Canada’s global hotel communications agency.
At the time, however, that line of thinking was far from traditional, as the communications industry was regionally biased. While other similar firms strived to perfect their execution, LMA looked to refine communications objectives and sales propositions holistically.
LMA’s first significant hotel client was Preferred Hotels & Resorts. Over the four years working with them, LMA moved from the traditional agency relationship to becoming a true business partner, managing their entire long-term strategic plan. As part of this assignment, Larry was responsible for meeting at least half of the property owners over six months. This meant traveling across the world and gaining a real understanding of the fundamentals of hospitality.
While managing LMA, Larry again took up a strategic leadership position, this time with Adventure Collection. With sales of over one-quarter billion dollars and 4,000 employees, his role as executive director was to encourage worldwide travel and eco-friendly best practices. This role saw him as a spokesperson at conferences, including the New York Travel Show, IATOS in Chicago, World Travel Market in London, and ITB Berlin. With the 2008-09 economic collapse, Adventure Collection was disbanded, and Larry resumed control and expansion of LMA.
Over the years, LMA Communications Inc. acted as a full-service marketing communications agency with an impressive track record of helping clients succeed. LMA delivered powerful and innovative ideas to a diversified worldwide client base: tourism, hospitality, associations, and the service sector. While headquartered in Toronto, over half of the Company’s business was conducted with clients outside of Canada. LMA’s solid international reputation was based upon its deep commitment to customers — long-term client relationships were treasured.
Wanting to focus solely on consulting for the hospitality industry, Larry sold this business in 2015, now known as LMA Digital.
Hotel Mogel Consulting
Larry and his son, Adam, jointly founded Hotel Mogel Consulting Ltd. Their goal was to help hotel developers, owners, and operators understand how to best manage their properties during this tumultuous period of technological disruption.
Presenting concepts, objectives, strategies, and executions as unique elements is often a hard sell because nowadays, we measure everything, often to reach some esoteric ‘deliverable’ metric. While we applaud this objective-setting trend, this approach usually foregoes strategic considerations, which is where Hotel Mogel comes in. Of course, we like to measure results, too, but we focus on what truly counts. Along these lines, a specialty of the consultancy has been pioneering the need for technological advances in the hospitality industry by developing strategies and comprehensive implementation programs.
More recently, Hotel Mogel has been called upon to assist developers seeking to maximize their hotels’ performance. As asset managers, we have focused on building the appropriate strategic action plans to deliver solid ROI.
Syndicated Writing & Public Speaking
With Adam as editor and researcher, Larry writes multiple syndicated columns for nine hospitality industry-based publications every week, with roughly 200 articles posted annually (1,600+ in total) and 175,000 readers monthly. Together, they have published eight books on hospitality management and marketing. As a much sought-after speaker at conferences worldwide, Larry has presented in Sydney, Paris, Berlin, Rome, Florence, Kyiv, Barcelona, Frankfurt, Madrid, Milan, Lisbon, London, Glasgow, Tokyo, and more than two dozen North American venues, always with the overall goal of helping hoteliers understand current market challenges and adapt accordingly.
Larry has been recognized by TravelClick as Worldwide eMarketer of the Year and by HSMAI (Hotel Sales and Marketing Association International) as one of the Top 25 Minds in Hospitality. More recently, in 2024 (for a second time), the International Hospitality Institute recognized Larry as one of the 50 Most Influential Educators in Hospitality.
