JRN Consultancy was founded in 2021 after two decades inside the industry. This is how we work, and why.
Most PR agencies learn luxury hospitality from the outside. They read the brief, study the brand book, and pitch a campaign. We learned it from inside Corinthia, Starwood, Ritz-Carlton, Accor and Shangri-La — across two decades, four continents, and every kind of property from urban flagships to desert retreats.
That background shapes everything we do. We have stood behind reception at 3am. We have watched a general manager rehearse a statement before a press call. We have written pre-opening plans for properties that had not poured their first foundation. When we brief a journalist, we understand which detail will land. When we counsel a client, we have usually been in the room before.
JRN was founded in 2021 by Ruwaida Abela Northen, formerly VP of PR and Corporate Communications at Shangri-La Group. She wanted to build the kind of agency she had always wished the industry had: boutique, senior-led, regionally fluent, willing to push back on a brief that needed pushing back on, and structured so the people doing the work were never ground down into mediocrity.
Five things that shape every engagement. Read them as a filter — if any of these land wrong, we are probably not the right fit.
We operate as an extension of your team, not as a vendor on a retainer. That changes the quality of the work and the speed of the decisions.
We take on a small number of clients at a time. If we are working with you, we are working with you — not splitting attention across fifteen accounts in a pod structure. We cap concurrent clients per senior lead.
We will tell you when a strategy is weak, when a story is not strong enough, or when an influencer is not worth the fee. You are paying us for judgement, not agreement.
We have active presence and media relationships in the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Qatar — three different markets, not one. We do not confuse them. Our Riyadh, Jeddah and Doha media specialists are in-country, not flown in for pitches.
The industry's standard model of burnout-as-badge is a strategic mistake, not a virtue. Rested people do better work. Our operational structure reflects that.
JRN is structured so the people you hire are the people doing the work. No pods. No junior hand-offs.