Miragha J. Seyidov, General Manager of Novotel Tbilisi Center, believes lasting performance begins with people, trust, and leaders who understand the operation. He learned the hotel business from the lobby up, starting in bell service and guest relations before moving through reservations, front-office leadership, sales, and general management.
Miragha began his hospitality career in 2005, working at JW Marriott Absheron Baku and Rixos properties in Türkiye and the UAE. His formative years focused on the guest-facing end of the operation, a perspective he later reinforced through executive hospitality studies at Les Roches and professional certifications in hotel administration, sales, marketing, and revenue management.
His career path eventually took him to regional sales and marketing leadership for Rixos in Azerbaijan and Georgia. He then led the repositioning of Tiflis Palace Hotel and the opening of Tiflis Veranda Restaurant at Gloria Luxury Hotels in Georgia, before moving to Kazakhstan to lead the reopening of the Cosmonaut Hotel. He has since taken on Accor assignments in Uzbekistan and Georgia.
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This is not a career built in one department, and that is precisely its strength. By the time Miragha became responsible for complete properties and portfolios, he had worked on both sides of the hotel equation: the experience guests see and the commercial and operational machinery behind it.
Restoring momentum at Novotel Tbilisi Center
Today, Miragha is leading the reopening and operational transformation of the 176-room Novotel Tbilisi Center. The assignment brings together much of what has shaped his career: brand standards, financial performance, owner expectations, team development, and the daily discipline of turning a building back into a functioning hotel.
Opening a new hotel is about creating momentum. Reopening one asks a more complicated question: how do you restore momentum, reset standards, rebuild confidence, and reintroduce a property to the market at the same time? At Novotel Tbilisi Center, Miragha’s remit stretches across every hotel function.
The job is not simply to bring operations back online, but to align the property with Accor standards, strengthen its commercial position, develop the team, and create the conditions for sustainable performance. For him, these are not separate projects. Guest satisfaction, financial results, and team performance are connected. If one is treated in isolation, the improvement rarely lasts.
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Ask Miragha about the achievement he values most and he does not point to a title or a single opening. He speaks instead about leading hotels through difficult periods while improving the way teams perform, guests experience the property, and the business delivers commercially. The milestone, in his view, is building a culture in which people take ownership. A target can be reached once through pressure. A strong culture is what allows good results to be repeated, especially when conditions are difficult and the general manager cannot be in every room.
Technology vs. human connection
Miragha’s view of the industry begins with three words: people, trust, and meaningful experiences. Technology, sustainability, and efficiency all matter, but he is clear about their proper role. They should support the human connection at the centre of hospitality, not replace it.
That distinction is becoming harder to protect. Hotels are managing rising operating costs, labour shortages, changing guest expectations, and geopolitical uncertainty, often all at once. Costs rise while guests expect more; teams become leaner at the exact moment service is expected to feel more personal. Technology can remove friction, but it can also tempt businesses to automate the very contact guests remember.
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There is no fashionable answer to that tension. It requires judgment: knowing where a system can make work easier and where a person must still be present, attentive, and genuinely interested. He describes his leadership as people-focused, performance-driven, and hands-on. In practice, that means setting clear expectations, leading visibly, and giving people both the responsibility and the trust to perform.
Being hands-on, in his case, is not about doing everyone’s job for them. It is about staying close enough to daily operations to understand where standards slip, where teams need support, and where a decision made at senior level creates an unintended problem on the floor. At the same time, he keeps sight of the wider picture: commercial performance, guest experience, talent development, and long-term sustainability.
The balance matters. Trust without clarity becomes confusion; standards without trust become control. Miragha’s approach sits between the two, with open communication, accountability, and continuous improvement as the operating rhythm. Away from the hotel, Miragha is family-oriented and trains regularly. He sees physical training as more than a pastime; it gives him discipline, energy, and balance, qualities he carries back into his professional life. His personal motto is equally direct: “Lead by example, stay humble, and keep moving forward.” It is not difficult to see the same principle running through his career, from his earliest operational roles to the responsibility of leading hotels across several markets.