From hotel media to medieval Italian rentals, the editor and consultant explains what she has learned about hospitality, perception and staying power.

Ashley M. Lands bought a one-way ticket to Rome on a sunny January morning in 2023. She was sitting at her computer in New York, coffee beside her, the Manhattan skyline filling the window. She had spent weeks talking the idea over with her closest friend. Then she clicked “buy.”

That moment says a lot about her. She thinks it through, she decides, and then she builds.

Today Ashley Lands is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Provincial Leisure, the founder of AML Hospitality, and a consultant to hotel groups that want their brands, media and daily operations to hold up over time. She lives in Italy. She has renovated medieval properties, helped revive a struggling hilltop village, and built a reputation on one stubborn belief: standards outlast attention.

A Texas childhood, an early start

Ashley Lands grew up an only child in the large cities of Texas. She says that shaped her independence early. She has also managed type 1 diabetes since childhood, and she credits her family’s steady support as her greatest source of strength.

Her career began in media. In her twenties, she said yes to almost everything. She worked as a journalist and consultant for companies across several industries at once, and her life started to revolve around the next event. She was tired and overextended. She now calls it the funniest period of her life, mostly because of what it taught her. Fewer commitments meant clearer focus, and clearer focus meant better work and better pay.

What hotels taught her about perception

Ashley Lands made her name on the media side of hospitality. She created content for hotels and helped build Provincial Leisure, a New York-based travel publication with illustrated guides to hotels, restaurants, rentals and local experiences. By her account, the platform reached about 55,000 email subscribers.

The numbers mattered less to her than what she learned from the work. She watched how a single strong photoshoot could lift how a property was seen. She also watched how months of scattered, inconsistent media could quietly wear that image down. Buyers, guests, and investors form opinions about a hotel long before they walk through the door, and she studied how.

The move to Italy

The decision to leave New York was personal and practical at once. Her best friend, interior designer Leah Wolf, had started restoring and hosting rental properties in a small Italian town. Both women worked in travel. Ashley Lands wondered whether their businesses could grow stronger together.

Four months followed. There were contractors, endless meetings, and long conversations with local mayors and business owners. In the end, the answer was yes.

The town is San Gregorio da Sassola, roughly 30 minutes from central Rome. Ashley Lands describes it as one of Italy’s dying towns, and she thinks it is worth saving. It has a 10th-century baronial castle, rolling farmland, and a rich local history. Wolf opened the first short-term rental there. Ashley Lands opened the second. They were also the first and second Americans to settle in the village.

Their approach went well beyond renovation. Guests buy fresh bread each morning from the neighborhood shops. They take private pasta lessons with a local home cook. They arrive to find the kitchen stocked with produce, eggs, meat, and dairy from nearby farmers. The team walks visitors around the village, introduces them to the butcher and points out a window dating back to the 12th century. Ashley Lands wants travel to be less about the destination and more about the community.

One moment from those early months stays with her. She and Wolf were planning cooking classes with a local chef and mentioned they might someday open a restaurant together. The chef began to cry. She had trained at university in Italy, earned her license, and waited twenty years for the right partners. Ashley Lands sat in the car afterward and cried too, from pure happiness. “It’s real,” she told Wolf.

A hard stretch behind the success

Ashley Lands does not hide the harder part of her story. In 2018 she began having repeated episodes she assumed were food poisoning. They lasted for months, and no doctor could explain them. Over the next three years, one symptom would fade, and another would take its place. She says friends and family pushed her to look into alternative medicine, and that it helped her get stable again. Then the pandemic arrived. She knew she needed a change.

Living in Italy taught her how much food and environment affect her health. It also deepened her trust in her own judgment. She counts endurance as her biggest milestone, partly because she never stopped working through those years. She negotiated contracts, moved countries, and launched new ventures. In her view, strength is rarely loud. It is consistent.

Hospitality, in her words

Ask Ashley Lands what defines hospitality, and she returns again and again to one idea: care, not price.

She tells a story about a McDonald’s in Austin, Texas. The floor manager presented sauces as though they were a tasting and personally checked on each table. It was not a luxury setting, yet the service felt intentional. To Ashley Lands, that is hospitality. Luxury, she says, is someone choosing to take five extra steps.

Owning property sharpened the point. She has stayed in modest hotels that felt warm and in expensive ones that felt tense. Marble and lighting mean little if the guest feels rushed. She treats guest experience as the outcome and staff culture as the source. If she could ask every employee one anonymous question, it would be whether guests truly enjoy being there, and if not, where the mood shifts.

Her rules for teams are plain. Train people well, then trust them to solve problems without escalating every one. Guests seldom remember the mistake. They remember how it was handled.

Advice for owners and operators

Through consulting, Ashley Lands advises hotel groups on repositioning, post-acquisition strategy and brand alignment. She pushes executive teams to match every renovation with disciplined distribution. Reopening week, she says, is not the goal. Staying relevant is.

She likes to put a blunt question to owners. If a buyer judged your business by your media alone, what would they conclude? Would they see something organized and consistent, or something scattered? To Ashley Lands, content is documentation, not decoration. It signals how disciplined a property is, and in a digital-first market, that shapes its value as much as occupancy does.

She also draws clear lines between roles. Professional photographers and videographers protect the asset through lighting, composition, and brand narrative. Creators translate the experience for their audiences. Both matter, and neither replaces the other.

Her business is changing with the times. AML Hospitality now pairs a decade of photography experience with AI-generated imagery, aimed at delivering premium quality at a lower cost. In March 2026, she also launched The VIP Guy with her brother, a platform for curated, high-access VIP bookings. She sees it as a progression, not a pivot. After years of shaping how exceptional destinations are seen, she wants to build a channel where access becomes real and structured.

Where she sees the industry going

Looking five years ahead, Ashley Lands expects generational change to speed up. Younger travelers grew up with AI. They expect smooth booking, quick check-ins and instant answers, and they read friction as a sign of old systems. She warns operators against sorting guests by age. Buying behavior is a better guide. Some of tomorrow’s VIP travelers, she points out, are building companies from their bedrooms.

She is just as direct about the travel she wants to see more of. She believes people will drift away from standard tourist activities and toward experiences that feel meaningful and local. That belief is why she moved her business to Italy in the first place.

Five habits behind her work

Ashley Lands has boiled her approach down to a few habits. Try an experience yourself before you sell it. Before the team offered its first aqueduct hike, everyone went on it together, along with guides, staff, friends, and potential customers. Know exactly who your customer is. Ask an Italian neighbor to pick olives, and they’ll wonder why the staff didn’t show up. Ask a big-city American, and they’ll pay for the privilege.

Look for inspiration in the place you work. Start before you feel ready, because, as she puts it, “The perfect moment will never find you.” And ask for help. She often points to the book Who, Not How by Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy, and she suspects most people fail a few times before they finally ask.

Leadership without noise

Ashley Lands describes authenticity as staying true to your values while being honest about your flaws. She argues that vulnerability builds trust and resilience, and she admits it carries real risk, from being judged to having your openness used against you. If she could start a movement, she says, it would focus on empathy and compassion.

Her advice to young women entering hospitality is blunt. Visibility is easy. Respect is earned through standards, follow-through, and accountability. Leadership does not need severity, only steadiness. She thinks laughter outlasts intimidation, but discipline has to stay visible.

She never argued her way into authority. She built it by doing the work, consistently, until the results spoke for her.

The roles have changed over the years: editor, property owner, consultant, founder. The thread has not. As Ashley Lands puts it, standards build authority long after visibility fades.

Explore more expert insights, leadership stories, and business strategies at GlobeVox Leaders