Who is Sabina Fluxà, the CEO who now runs the Iberostar hotel empire?

Sabina Fluxà Thienemann was born in April 1980 in Palma de Mallorca. She is the eldest daughter of Miguel Fluxà Rosselló, chairman of the Iberostar hotel group, and Sabina Thienemann. Since 2017 she has held the role of vice-chairman and chief executive officer, in charge of day-to-day operations, while her father remains chairman.

The group's history goes back to 1956, when her grandfather Llorenç Fluxà Figuerola, a shoemaker in Inca, Mallorca, bought a small network of travel agencies called Viajes Iberia. In the early 1960s his son Miguel Fluxà Rosselló took over the family's tourism activities. The Iberostar brand was born in 1983 with the opening of the first hotels in Mallorca, and the group went international in 1993 with the opening of the Iberostar Bávaro, its first Caribbean property, in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic.

Sabina Fluxà earned a degree and then an MBA at the ESADE business school, before completing a general management programme at IESE Business School in 2013. She joined the Iberostar group in January 2005 and became co-vice-chairman in November 2006, a post she held for more than a decade before moving up to CEO. Between 2016 and 2021 she also sat as an independent director on Telefónica's board, and held director roles at ACS and Dragados.

Named vice-chairman and CEO of the group in 2017, she has steered Iberostar's transformation around three publicly stated priorities: talent, digitalisation and innovation. Her sister, Gloria Fluxà Thienemann, is vice-chairman and Chief Sustainability Officer of the group, a split of roles that structures the family's governance of the company.

Under Sabina Fluxà's leadership, Iberostar runs the «Wave of Change» movement, focused on cutting single-use plastics, sourcing seafood responsibly and protecting coastlines. In 2020 the group said it had become the world's first hotel chain to eliminate single-use plastic across all its properties, with a stated goal of carbon neutrality by 2030. It was within that push that her sister, Gloria Fluxà Thienemann, rather than Sabina, was named to Time magazine's TIME100 Climate list on 16 November 2023, recognised for her role steering climate action in the tourism sector.

In 2025 and 2026, Sabina Fluxà has stepped up her public appearances: in March 2025 she met the Dominican Republic's tourism minister David Collado to discuss new hotel projects in the country; in October 2025, on the podcast Emprendedores, she announced Iberostar's intention to expand into Southeast Asia, while prioritising growth in the markets the group already operates in. Presenting the group's 2025 results, she said the figures confirmed the strength of a model geared towards profitable growth and a long-term vision, and that the group was entering 2026 with a firm commitment to investing, framing talent development as essential to creating sustainable value in its destinations. The group has since detailed a 1 billion euro investment plan running through 2028 to develop new projects and upgrade existing properties across its main destinations.

Now at the head of a group that counts more than a hundred hotels across some fifteen countries, Sabina Fluxà embodies the fourth generation of a family that started out in a shoemaker's workshop in Inca. Based in Mallorca, she keeps presenting sustainability as a condition for competitiveness in tourism, rather than a marketing add-on.

Photo credit: Sabina Fluxà Thienemann, photo published by the official Iberostar account on Wikimedia Commons on 14 March 2016, CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.

This portrait was prepared with AI assistance, then cross-checked, verified and edited by our editorial team, who take full editorial responsibility for it. Facts verified on 18 August 2026.