Annabella Santos Wisniewski ’65

When Ted Teng ’79, Chairperson of the Cornell Hotelie Hall of Fame Committee, and two of its members, Kristin Sander Urhammer ’99 and Carla Petzold-Beck ’95, approached her at a Cornell Hotel Society event in Amsterdam this year, Annabella Wisniewski got the surprise of her life.

“You have been selected as one of the inductees for this year,” Ted told her.

Was it her turn as the token female, or token Asian, or token something for the Hall of Fame? She was truly in awe, but could joke with Ted about it, with the prejudices of the past comfortably behind her.

As soon as she was alone, in suitable quietude, she found herself looking back across a journey of 60 years.

Annabel, as she has come to be more widely and familiarly known, was born into the restaurant and hotel business. Her mother, Honorata Fajardo, owned and ran Bungalow Food Services, the largest restaurant company in the Philippine industry in the 1950s. Naturally, her mom would have none of her teenage dream of becoming an architect, like her father.

“You should go into business; then you can support a hobby like architecture,” she said, and proceeded to command Annabel: “Go to the best hotel school there is. Go to Cornell.”

Within months, her mom and friends were hosting H. B. Meek, the founding dean of Cornell’s School of Hotel Administration, in Manila. Once she heard Dean Meek’s spiel on Cornell, Annabel was sold and obediently on her way to Ithaca.

“At Cornell,” Annabel recalls, “we had to be serious to make it. Entrepreneurship is genderless. It’s the passion for excellence that distinguishes oneself, coupled with the drive, motivation, confidence, and courage to take risks.” In her Cornell class, 92 percent of students were male.

After graduating from the Hotel School in 1965, Annabel knew she had to come home – it was the unspoken deal, but she stalled and got a job in Hawaii at the Kahala Hilton. The taste of independence had her yearning for more but, without financial independence, home beckoned.

Once back in the Philippines, Annabel was eager to share what she had learned with those who lacked the privilege of that education. She suggested that the Hotel and Restaurant Association of the Philippines invite Cornell professors to provide seminars in the summers. And they came, led by Dean Robert Beck, for three consecutive years. It was the first major exposure of local hoteliers and restaurateurs to international educators in the hospitality industry, and it led to the expansion of the Hotel and Restaurant Department of the University of the Philippines and further to the creation of the Asian Institute of Tourism in that University.

Not long after returning home, however, Annabel felt she needed more experience and more freedom. On the pretext of having to go to New York to formalize her resignation from Hilton, she asked her mother for plane fare. Her mom was not fooled, but gave her the money all the same, thinking Annabel deserved some rest before plunging herself into the family business.

But New York had a job for her, at the Waldorf Astoria, and she was convinced to stay. A student visa for graduate studies at the Hotel School provided a quick solution to arranging a legal stay. She called her mom again for the necessary resources. “She replied by practically disowning me!”

With Professor Gerald Lattin’s help Annabel took a variety of jobs on campus — teaching assistantships, working at the Statler Hotel, and resident assistant at Mary Donlon Hall, thus supporting her own stay. During her graduate studies she met Tom Wisniewski ’71, a tall, handsome Marine who had just returned from Vietnam.

Scarcely reconciled with her mother, Annabel rang her to share the news that she was marrying Tom. In keeping with Philippine tradition, the whole family flew to Ithaca for the wedding. Six months later the couple visited Manila, and Tom liked it enough to stay for 11 years and, with Annabel, help her mom manage her business, expanding it rapidly.

While in Manila she and Tom also started their own hospitality consulting firm with major clients like Philippine Airlines, Orchard Hotels, Ascott, and the Manila Polo Club. But Martial Law was proclaimed in the Philippines and finding the business environment too suffocating, Tom and Annabel, now with three boys, moved to San Francisco where she joined the Pacific Area Travel Association as Director of Development.

The entrepreneurial urge, however, was simply too strong to contain and they developed, with a partner, the 95-room Orchard boutique hotel in San Francisco along with a critically acclaimed French restaurant, Annabel’s. As many Bay Area hotels were still recovering from the early 1980’s recession, they formed a company to rescue distressed hotels.

Pictured: Jan-Willen den Ridder ’80, Annabella Wisniewski ’65, Jeanne Sander ’66

An industry colleague, hotelie classmate, and CHS past president, Jeanne Brown Sander ’66, sees the revolutionary in Annabel. “The trend in the hotel business in the ’60s and ’70s was to forget about planning to own and run your own and to join a big chain. That, after all, was where the money was made, but that was not Annabel.”

After 12 years of successes as a rescuer, Annabel took up an offer from Singapore, in 1994, to sit as the first woman director of Ascott International LTD, charged with presiding over its International Hospitality Division. Tom remained in San Francisco, holding the fort for their American businesses, and, from separate locations, they watched over their three sons, away in other states for school – with middle son Andrej ’94 at the Hotel School at Cornell.

At the painful cost of separation, Annabel was opening luxury properties for Ascott in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, and London. She introduced the first luxury long-stay lodging with full hotel services in Singapore to an unserved international corporate market. Asked to open one in the Philippines, the serendipitous assignment provoked what would turn out to be a prescient thought, Why am I doing all this for someone else when I could be doing it for myself and for my own country?

The Wisniewskis came home to Manila in 1996 and set up Raintree Management Partners. Through the Asian financial crisis of 1997, the Wisniewskis kept their company going with projects capitalized by companies that could afford the risks. In 1999, they bought out their partner and started a new hotel and restaurant company with three employees. Today, its workforce has grown to just under one thousand.

“I didn’t really envision anything big. We had already done enough to be proud of ourselves and set in our lives. I wanted to give something back, help raise the standards for the local industry, and showcase a new kind of management,” Annabel says.

Raintree created, in the atrium of one Manilla’s best-situated office buildings, its first Foodpark—a sprawling food hall with small restaurants, food vendors, and shops. And upon learning the historic Ayala Museum was building a new museum with a café, Annabel remarked, “Don’t tell me it’s going to be another of those teahouses for little old ladies!” Instead, they selected her concept of what became M Café, and on its success, Raintree has expanded the Foodparks and restaurant company to 12 brands in 30 locations around the Philippines.

Alongside Raintree, Annabel and her hotel partner created Discovery Suites, a successful serviced apartment hotel in Manila as well as Discovery Shores, the first luxury resort on the Island of Boracay, when local resorts were all two and three-star levels. Soon, international luxury hotels were sprouting and tourism booming. The company opened resorts in typhoon devastated and impoverished provincial locations, detecting a strong potential for tourism. These properties set new standards, employing hundreds of local workers, engaging native suppliers, and boosting local economies.

Bobby Horrigan, GM at Discovery Hotels when Annabel was president and CEO, refers to her as a “living legend” in the industry. Discovery, the first Filipino luxury hotel group, is now a brand, taking awards from Tatler, Travel & Leisure, and Conde Nast Traveller, among other publications.

Pictured: Jeanne Sander ’66, Leif Evensen’66, Annabella Wisniewski ’65, Michael Chiu ’66

Raintree continues to evolve, and Annabel continues to be fully involved, opening new concepts following the Covid pandemic including two new country garden restaurants, Farmer’s Table and My Country House. Albert Alcantara, Raintree’s Director for Finance and a member of the executive committee, sees Annabel as “a visionary leader who, with her strong presence and guidance, has the remarkable ability to influence, inspire, and motivate employees whether as individuals or as teams.” “But it’s her compassionate nature that shines through. She bets strongly on native Filipino traits – warm and welcoming. Given the appropriate education, training, and motivation, Filipinos, she hasn’t the slightest doubt, make great hotel and restaurant managers.”

“At Raintree,” Annabel herself says, “we work very hard to create a strong sense of place. I don’t want to be waking up in a beautiful patch of property and not know that I’m in Bali or Phuket or Singapore. Whether it’s Misibis Bay or in Baler or on Boracay Island or in Tagaytay, the resorts and restaurants should take in the best of the character of the place, the best view and ambiance, the best local hires. It must unmistakably exude that local sense of community.”

Annabel is pleased the next generation of managers, including two of her sons, is stepping up to take on the reins. Her one regret is that Tom cannot be at her acceptance of the Hall of Fame honor – he passed on in 2018. “If only Tom were still here,” she is in fact heard to say all too often.  Annabel and Tom had always been a team, navigating the roughest waters and pulling it off together – through consulting deals with international hotel companies, through the pioneering Discovery Suites, and through Raintree. In 1998, for Discovery Suites, they received the Best Employer Award from Hewitt Associates and the Wall Street Journal. Their Boracay Discovery Shores was judged in 2010 as one of the top 15 family hotels in Asia.

Annabel can rest on her laurels now – a finalist for Ernst & Young Philippines’ Entrepreneur of the Year, one of the “1I Bossings in the Philippines,” a PLDT-Smart prize for business leadership, and one of the top 55 Philippine entrepreneurs named by the Philippine Center for Entrepreneurship Foundation.

Her advice to those who may want to follow her path: “Success takes believing – in yourself and in your dreams. Stay passionate, persevere, and pray a lot. Don’t forget that in the end it’s all beyond profit, outside your balance sheet. It’s about family, country, and the difference you have made in the lives of others.”