A family business can appoint a new chief executive in an afternoon. Getting everybody to experience the change may take years. Diego Vallarino has described that slower undertaking from inside Grupo VerdeAzul, the Panamanian investment group whose hotels and residential communities give the family name a very public address.
By July 2023, he could look back on seven years leading the operation. What he chose to emphasise was the transition itself: more peaceful, less disruptive, something with real consequences for employees even if it rarely appeared among the obvious business achievements. Buildings make convenient milestones. A colleague becoming comfortable with a new decision-maker is harder to photograph.
His explanation of succession was refreshingly patient. The person taking over has to grow into the position. The person handing over has to decide to delegate. Neither process happens overnight. A company may have a chart showing who reports to whom; the people on it still need time.
The handover nobody can hurry
There are two Vallarinos in the leadership picture. Alberto Vallarino Clément chairs Grupo VerdeAzul’s board. Diego Vallarino Lewis is its CEO and executive president. The distinction is useful: a family relationship and an operating responsibility occupy the same organisation, with different jobs to do.
At a family-business discussion reported in November 2018, father and son offered complementary perspectives. Alberto favoured the family-office concept for managing a family’s assets and planning, including situations in which some children wanted to participate and others did not. Diego described the transition from the first generation to the second as grounded in meritocracy.
Read together, those positions reveal the practical question beneath the inheritance story. How should a family organise its assets, its ambitions and the work of its members? Affection does not provide an organisational chart. Nor does an organisational chart settle every question of affection. Both require some tact.
Diego’s later account allows the handover to remain a process rather than a ceremonial moment. There is room in it for the founder’s continuing presence and the successor’s developing authority. The quieter achievement is that the business can keep functioning while those relationships change.
An engineer takes the long way home
Vallarino’s preparation began well beyond the family company. He graduated from Cornell in 2005, studied finance and banking at the University of Alcalá in 2007, and completed an MBA at Harvard Business School in 2012. His current biography describes the Cornell qualification as operations research and industrial engineering.
A securities filing also records internships with Copa Airlines, the Panama Canal Authority and the Port of Singapore Authority. Aviation, a canal and a port make an interesting early itinerary for someone whose later work would depend on bringing people and capital into Panama. The connections are visible in the record, without requiring a childhood prophecy.
Before joining Grupo VerdeAzul in 2012, he worked in financial analysis at Banco Santander in Madrid and co-founded Futurad, an outdoor digital-signage company. His route included an established bank and a young business, a combination that put different kinds of organisation on his résumé.
Those experiences matter to the shape of his career. The familiar surname did not make the years abroad disappear. He returned with engineering, banking and business training, then entered an enterprise where the responsibilities were close to home and the results would be visible across the country.
A lender’s view of the building
In 2014, Vallarino joined the board of Banco Nacional de Panamá, where he chaired the credit committee. In October 2017, he became chairman of the board, serving until 2019. Alongside property development and hospitality, his career therefore included responsibility at a public bank.
The developer and the lender encounter the same proposed building from different directions. One sees a place to create; the other must assess the money and the obligations supporting it. Vallarino’s roles put both perspectives within his working life. The hotel drawing and the repayment schedule belong to the same project, however differently they dress for a meeting.
By January 2024, his account of Panama’s property market was attentive to the financing behind a sale. He described modest improvement during 2023 and the pressure rising interest rates could place on buyers’ purchasing power. He also pointed to foreign purchasers as an important source of demand.
His discussion distinguished people moving for corporate work, international apartment buyers and North Americans looking near the beach. Those groups arrive with different reasons for buying and different financing needs. An apartment address alone tells only part of the story; the buyer’s route to it matters too.
He also spoke about meetings and conference tourism in Panama City. His argument connected air access, corporate presence and convention facilities. It was a view of hospitality that looked beyond the room itself to the activity capable of bringing a guest through the door.
The hotel after the ribbon is cut
Grupo VerdeAzul’s hotel developments include Bristol Panamá, Marriott Panama, The Santa Maria Hotel & Golf Resort and The Buenaventura Golf & Beach Resort. A list of properties gives the outline. Their affiliations and operations supply some of the more revealing detail.
Buenaventura became part of Marriott’s Autograph Collection in 2017. The announcement placed Diego alongside Alberto, Ana María Vallarino and hotel-industry colleagues. It described an offering that combined Spanish colonial architecture with work by local artisans and experiences connected to Panamanian history and culture.
That combination presents a familiar hospitality problem in concrete form. A hotel wants the reach of an international brand while giving visitors reasons to remember where they stayed. A room can meet a common standard and still belong to a particular place. The difficult work lies in making both intentions appear natural to the guest.
In December 2020, a partnership between Jurny, Pensio and Grupo VerdeAzul proposed bringing technology and booking services into residential condominium operations at Buenaventura. The announced model included an app, keyless access and virtual support. These were operational choices about how a stay would actually work.
Bristol Panamá’s subsequent affiliation with Wyndham’s Registry Collection brought another version of the same balancing act. Vallarino welcomed its distribution and loyalty programme while stressing the importance of preserving Bristol’s identity. The guest’s experience and the commercial machinery that finds that guest have to coexist.
These decisions continue long after construction. A building has an opening date; its operation has a calendar that keeps turning. In Vallarino’s career, development and hospitality remain connected through the ordinary business of bookings, service, partnerships and repeat visits.
A coast becomes a shared undertaking
In April 2023, businesses launched the Cámara de Turismo de la Riviera Pacífica and elected Vallarino its first president. He was among the initiative’s principal promoters. The chamber’s stated purpose was to encourage investment and economic growth in the region.
The launch brought together representatives of Panama’s tourism chamber, its hotel association, the Coclé chapter of its business-executive association, and businesses from Coclé and Panamá Oeste. The membership around the table mattered. A destination depends on organisations whose responsibilities extend beyond any one resort.
That appointment widened Vallarino’s working frame. At Grupo VerdeAzul, he could make decisions for the company. In the chamber, the assignment involved a region and other businesses with their own interests. The prospect of more visitors provided common ground, while the work required coordination.
An editorial view of the connections in Vallarino’s tourism argument.
The chamber offers a useful way to understand the scale of that coordination. Promotion, accommodation and access meet in the visitor’s decision to travel. The traveller gets one holiday. The businesses supplying it have several separate tasks to finish first.
His March 2026 appearance on The Traveling Golf Diva Podcast with Doris Muscarella returned to that relationship between place and visitor, discussing Buenaventura and Santa Maria through golf and travel. It put the developments in the context of an itinerary rather than a property portfolio.
A father’s definition of custody
Vallarino was born in Panama City. In a June 2018 interview about fatherhood, he spoke about enjoying films with his children, going to the beach and beginning to play golf. The leisure interests sit comfortably beside his hotel work, though the domestic details give them a less corporate setting.
He also described a responsibility extending past his own children to their successors. Parents, in his formulation, hold something temporarily and pass it along. He put it in five Spanish words: “Los padres somos un custodio.”
“Los padres somos un custodio.”
Diego Vallarino, 2018
“Parents are custodians.” Translation.
The thought gives the succession story a personal register. Receiving something valuable creates an obligation towards whoever receives it next. His concern was to contribute to a better country and a better life for future generations. It is a demanding definition of inheritance: the recipient also has work to do.
There was a lighter declaration of allegiance in the same interview. Asked about the 2018 football World Cup, he backed Panama, then other Latin American teams. The chief executive could discuss generations and national responsibility; the football supporter had a rather quicker answer ready.
The fifty-year question
By March 2026, Grupo VerdeAzul reported more than $130 million in 2025 sales and described a $166.5 million investment plan for real estate and hospitality during 2026 and 2027. Vallarino spoke of a property-development pipeline extending over the next 50 years.
2025
2026-2027
These figures describe different clocks: reported sales, intended expenditure and a much longer development horizon. A pipeline still needs execution. Vallarino’s accompanying emphasis on capital and committed shareholders recognises that property and hotels operate in cycles.
His stated ambition for the coming decade is to help turn the Pacific Riviera into a tourism hub, supported by more frequent flights and employment. The aspiration brings his interests together: finance, hospitality, development and the country where the family enterprise operates.
The handover inside Grupo VerdeAzul took patience. The horizon outside it asks for more. Vallarino’s story now turns on the relationship between the decisions a chief executive makes this year and the places another generation will inherit.