After graduating from MODUL Hotel and Tourism school in 1982, Michaela Reitterer started her career at the UNO Centre in Vienna as F&B Manager before deciding to establish her own travel agency, Hippesroither GmbH. In 2001, she purchased her parents’ hotel, the Boutique Hotel Stadthalle – one of the first ecolabeled hotels in Austria. Additionally, in 2007 she founded a new company for hotel management and operation: the P-Orange GmbH. Ms Reitterer subsequently signed a master franchise contract with easyHotel.com for Austria and CEE. Furthermore she became Chairman of the Austrian Hotelier Association (ÖHV) Vienna in 2006.

In 2009, she expanded her Boutique Hotel Stadthalle to a worldwide innovation, namely the world‘s first city-hotel with a zero-energy-balance, meaning it is a passive house with ultra low energy requirements.  For this pioneering task, Ms Reitterer and her team were awarded with several awards. In 2010, the Boutique Hotel Stadthalle has been nominated for the “green hotel of the year” award and will apply for the global energy award.

Bibiane studied architecture in Vienna. In 1994, she founded the architecture firm o.r.t. architektur. Since 2002, Bibiane also works as a lecturer in tourism architecture at the Institute of Urban Design and Landscape Architecture, Vienna University of Technology. Between 2003 and 2005, Bibiane wrote architecture reviews for the daily newspaper Kurier. Bibiane is founder and chair of platou, a platform for architecture in tourism. Platou is an interdisciplinary network at the interface of tourism and architecture. It aims to contribute to research in the field, act as a mediator and support endeavours in this area through consultancy work. Bibiane is also a chair member of ig-architektur and has published widely about the topic, e.g. in the trade magazine Hotelstyle.