Hello, I am Corina

My story

From East Germany to the Gulf

I grew up in East Germany. I could not travel until I was 12, when the Berlin Wall came down. Families waited up to fifteen years for a used car, and I had never met an Arab person in my life.

When East and West reunited, the world changed overnight. Lifestyles that had been similar suddenly drifted apart, and many families broke apart with them. So when I moved to London and started working in five-star hospitality at The Dorchester, what struck me most about my Gulf guests was how much family mattered. They asked about mine. They were interested in me as a person, not just as someone serving them.

One of my first clients was a Kuwaiti gentleman my colleagues found difficult. I simply asked how he was and took a genuine interest in him. He became my biggest fan, and I was the only one who never had a problem with him. Without knowing it, I had found the thing I would build my career on.

Learning the Gulf the hard way

At first, almost everything confused me: the titles, the names that sounded alike, who was who and how everyone fitted together. This was before social media, and there was very little written down. The only way to learn was from people who knew, and I was lucky to have an incredible mentor.

Hosting royal families and VIP delegations was a steep learning curve. It was never only about the principal. It was about everyone around them: the chief of staff, the security team, the right person being addressed in the right way, and the right manager being there to show face. Get those details right and people come back for years.

In 2005 and 2006, guests began inviting me to Qatar and Dubai, at a time when few people from my world went. I fell in love. People opened their homes to me and invited me to dinner. I first travelled to Saudi Arabia in 2011, when it was a very different country from the one it is today.

Building Corinthia London’s Middle East business

In 2011 I joined the opening team of Corinthia London. Many people told me I was in the wrong location and would never attract Middle Eastern clients. But when I walked through the hotel, I could see it had been built with Gulf guests in mind, and I trusted the relationships I had built over the years before. I grew the hotel’s Middle Eastern business to a couple of million a year, and later consulted for Corinthia for seven more years.

What wasta taught me

One moment captures the Gulf for me. A senior executive I worked with was held at the airport in a Gulf country because of a visa mix-up, on the day of his most important meetings. His office called me: did I know anyone? I phoned a client I had looked after for years. Within fifteen minutes, he went from being held at the airport to a red-carpet welcome.

That is wasta: relationships, trust and people who are genuinely happy to help. It would never happen that way in Germany. In the Gulf, the right relationship changes everything.

Why I founded Star-CaT

I founded Star-CaT in 2015. My son was very small and I wanted more freedom, while still consulting for hotels. Then the questions started, many of them from women. What is it like to travel to Saudi Arabia? Aren’t you scared? How do people react? I realised I could help far more people than one hotel at a time.

The Embedded Relationship Method

Everything I teach comes back to one idea: take a real interest in your clients from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, Oman, Kuwait and Bahrain, and understand both what they share and what makes each country different. In the Gulf you might spend hours with someone talking about everything except business, and that is exactly how the relationship is built. Many Westerners miss this. I help them close that gap, so they become known and trusted before the first meeting.

What the West still gets wrong

The biggest myth I hear about Saudi Arabia is that women have no rights and life is closed off. In reality, some of the warmest, funniest people I have ever met are Saudi, and that hospitality runs right across the region. As a German, I would never have expected business contacts to invite me into their home. In the Gulf, it is simply how people connect.

The region has also changed at extraordinary speed: Qatar’s World Cup, Saudi Arabia opening places like AlUla and Diriyah, Dubai becoming a global place to do business, and Abu Dhabi’s commitment to tolerance, embodied by the Abrahamic Family House, where a church, a mosque and a synagogue stand side by side. Yet the gap between what people think and what is really happening is still enormous. Helping to close it is my purpose.

Choosing a favourite country is impossible. Qatar always felt like home, Abu Dhabi impresses me with how open it is, and Saudi Arabia has changed the most. Today I take my son with me, and Saudi Arabia is now one of his favourite places in the world.

That gap is also the subject of my research. In the November–December 2026 issue of The European Business Review, I am lead author of “What First Impressions in the West versus the Gulf Really Mean”, written with Professor David De Cremer (King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, MIT and Thinkers50), Professor Emilios Galariotis (KFUPM) and Sufian Hwedi (Northeastern University). It explains why Western executives can leave a Gulf meeting convinced it went brilliantly, and then never hear back.

Why I created The Gulf Desk and the Majlis Brief

I started The Gulf Desk because the Gulf deserves more honest reporting: what is really happening on the ground, and what it means for business. The Majlis Brief was born out of my own frustration. There was so much news and noise that even I could not keep up. Leaders have no time, but they cannot afford not to know what is going on, so I built the tool I wished I had.

What I want you to feel

I want the people I work with to feel that their world has opened up. Less fear, especially for women travelling to the region. More confidence about how business works, what to do and what to avoid, how to plan their year and which events matter. And I want them to come away not only with better business, but with partners and friends in the Gulf. If I can change one person’s opinion about going there, I have done my job.

See how I can help your business in the Gulf