Lisa Lutoff-Perlo made headlines as the first woman president and CEO of Celebrity Cruises when she took the helm of the line in 2014. In her new memoir, Making Waves, she offers hard-won wisdom she has gathered over her nearly 40-year career in the industry, climbing her way from door-to-door cruise salesperson all the way to the C-suite.
“It’s a leadership book above all else," Lutoff-Perlo says. "It’s all of the lessons that I’ve learned along my way, from the very bottom to the very top. I want to share them in the hope that one or two or many of them will resonate with people.”
Condé Nast Traveler sat down with Lutoff-Perlo to hear more about her advice from the book, which will be released on February 20, 2024.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You dedicate one of the chapters to “finding your superpower,” and you say that being a woman is one of yours. Can you elaborate on that?
Lisa Lutoff-Perlo: One of my superpowers that I thought was the “X factor”—the fact that I’m a woman. There’s a lot of research that shows that women leaders are different. They think differently, and they lead differently. I always found that genuine caring and empathy were something that were superpowers of mine that got a disproportionate amount of effort from the people that I had the honor and privilege of working with everyday. Especially when I think about our crew from all over the world who leave their families for so many months at a time, and many of them leave children. I wanted to be a leader that they knew genuinely cared about them.
You got a lot of attention for being the first woman CEO of Celebrity Cruises. You say in the book that it frustrated you, but you decided to “go with it.” How did you turn that into an advantage?
LLP: I worked very hard for 30 years to finally get this position as president and CEO [of Celebrity]. It was late 2014, and it was something that seems to have really resonated. My phone was ringing off the hook, and it was interesting because I didn’t think anything of it. This was the third position in the company where I was the first woman to do it. Now granted, it was the highest profile, so of course it got the most attention. I remember being a little irritated that everyone would ask me, so what does it feel like to be the first woman? I was overwhelmed by the attention I got, and I was annoyed by it because that was the focus. Then I decided that I was going to go with it, and I was going to use it to my advantage. Because the only way you can make a difference is if you have a platform or a voice. It certainly helped Celebrity, which was always at the top of my list of things to do.
Right before Covid-19 became a global pandemic, there was the International Women’s Day cruise in 2020, and the ship’s bridge was helmed by an all-woman crew. Why was that an important symbolic initiative for you?
I was grateful to be in a position where I could balance gender diversity on our ships to the degree I was able to. And that started with the appointment of Captain Kate McHugh to captain of Celebrity, the first woman captain for Celebrity. It was a wonderful thing to be able to do because she was so deserving. We were able to increase the number of women in our bridges when I took over in 2014 from three percent up to a third by the time I stepped down from my role.
We were in a planning meeting, and the idea [for the International Women’s Day cruise] came from our PR department, who said, wouldn’t it be really cool to be the first cruise line ever to have an all-woman bridge team? And then we took it a step further and made all of the leaders on board women. And I remember thinking how special and cool that was because it was something the industry had never been able to do before. How often in your career do you get to create a legacy like that?
During the pandemic, you had the professional crisis of dealing with the shutdown of the industry, but you also had some personal difficulties as well. I think so many women felt this way during the pandemic, and are still recovering. What takeaways could you share from that time?
It was a really tough time, Covid, while we were shut down. My sister was diagnosed with cancer in April 2020. The virtual reveal of our new ship Celebrity Beyond was April 2021, and it was only a few days before my sister ended up passing. And so that was another perfect storm of things you never, ever thought about happening. It was a really troubling and heartbreaking time for me. We were planning a virtual reveal for Beyond. It all happened so close to my sister’s passing, but it was something that I needed to carry by myself. I couldn’t burden my team with it, I couldn’t burden anyone else with it. I could only show up as my most enthusiastic self while everything was falling apart around me. That might mean that you have to compartmentalize. I probably spent a lot of my life and career compartmentalizing because as professionals, that’s really all we can do. I remember shutting down, leaving the virtual reveal, and going back to my sister’s bedside. That was probably the hardest thing of all. I had to show up because so many people were depending on me.
I always say that at the end of the day—or the end of a life—you need to be able to look back and say that while things might have been out of balance during a particular time, overall my life had a balance that I can be proud of.
Making Waves: A Woman's Rise to the Top Using Smarts, Heart, and Courage by Lisa Lutoff-Perlo will be published on February 20, 2024, by Matt Holt Books, an imprint of BenBella Books.