Luis Santos
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Work

A company, an investment arm,
and the ventures that taught me focus.

I build in property, and I have built around it. The flagship is First Class. The rest is a record of where I have put capital and attention, including the places I chose to step back from.

Flagship

First Class

Short-term rental management across Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Ras Al Khaimah. It grew from a single apartment in 2020 to one of the highest-rated property operations in the region, on the back of systems rather than scale for its own sake.

600+
Homes managed
4.9★
Airbnb review score
280k+
Guest nights
90%+
Occupancy

First Class manages homes on behalf of owners and hosts them for guests from more than 160 countries. It holds the highest review score of any host in the Middle East on Airbnb, and has run without a single compliance fine. None of that comes from charm. It comes from response times, cleaning reliability, pricing discipline, and fixing small things fast, run as an operation rather than a side income.

Pricing, run daily

Nightly rates move with real demand rather than sitting on a fixed list, so rate and occupancy climb together instead of trading off against each other.

Answered in minutes

Guest messages are handled fast and small problems are fixed before they turn into reviews. The review score is the output of that discipline, not the target.

One standard, every home

Cleaning, maintenance, and turnover run to the same fixed standard across all 600+ homes, so the six-hundredth apartment performs like the first.

Stay with First Class → List your property →
Investment arm

First Class Investments

Founded in 2025 for clients who want the returns of this market without operating in it themselves. End to end: sourcing the right property, repositioning it, and running it under First Class. The operating company feeds the investment company its track record, and the investment company feeds the operating company its pipeline.

The thesis is the operation itself. A well-chosen Dubai property, repositioned and run to the First Class standard, targets a six to ten percent gross yield on top of the appreciation this market has delivered. One JBR unit, reconfigured from a one-bed into a two-bed, was acquired for 528,000 dollars and runs at a 10 percent net yield, with a 12 percent one-time uplift from the repositioning.

See how it works → First Class Investments →
In the sector

Shaping the rules

I am a founding board member of the Holiday Homes Business Group at Dubai Chambers, working with the regulator and other operators on how the short-term rental sector is governed. Building a company and helping shape the ground it stands on are the same job, done at two scales.

Before First Class

A decade of turnarounds and transformations.

Before I built companies of my own, I spent ten years rebuilding how large companies operate, leading operational turnarounds and transformations across Europe and the Gulf. I did it from inside the firms that specialise in it, and inside the businesses themselves.

The firms
AlixPartnersFour Principles, Abdul Latif JameelKaizen Institute
Companies I’ve transformed
Al-FuttaimVolvoMagnaBoschNespressoPhilipsEtihad AirwaysFarfetchUnilabsDr Sulaiman Al Habib

Two of these I would go on to build in myself: healthcare, where I had advised hospital groups, and food, where I had worked with names like Nespresso and Aveleda. The consulting was the apprenticeship. The next part is what I built with it.

What I built

Then I built my own.

I stopped advising and started building, in several of the same sectors I had spent a decade inside. Hospitality became the one I went all in on, with First Class. The others I built, ran, and in time exited or stepped back from, to put my full attention behind the flagship.

Healthcare

Dr Reuter Medical Center

A multi-specialty medical centre I helped build. I have since exited and no longer hold a stake; the clinic continues to operate across two locations in Dubai. A close look at how regulated, trust-heavy businesses are built, and how different their rhythm is from hospitality.

Visit the clinic →
Food & beverage

A seven-brand delivery kitchen, and a kiosk at Global Village

Seven delivery-only restaurant brands run from one kitchen, plus the Argentinian Steak Sandwich stand at Global Village. Built, run, and since stepped back from. A fast, unglamorous lesson in thin margins and heavy operations.

Fintech

tXPay

An early venture in blockchain payments, built to connect smart contracts with real-world transactions. Direct, hands-on exposure to the economics of moving money and the mechanics of a new asset class.

The lesson across all of them was the same: attention is the scarcest input, and the discipline is spending it where the return is clearest.