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
97.8%
Review score
110k
Guest nights
94%
Occupancy

First Class manages homes on behalf of owners and hosts them for guests from more than a hundred 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.

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, setting it up, and running it under First Class. The operating company and the investment company reinforce each other, one supplies the track record, the other the pipeline.

How it works →
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 any of it

A decade studying how businesses run.

First Class is the flagship, not the origin. For ten years I worked in operational consulting and transformation, learning how industries actually run from the inside, across Europe and the Gulf. The firms I did it with, and a sample of the companies I did it for, by sector.

The firms
Kaizen InstituteFour PrinciplesAlixPartnersAl-Futtaim
Automotive
Volvo TrucksRenault TrucksMagnaBenteler
Electronics
BoschPhilips
FMCG & food
Nestlé NespressoAveleda
Aviation
Etihad Airways
E-commerce
Farfetch
Healthcare
UnilabsDr Sulaiman Al Habib
Retail
SPARSONAE Sierra

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 taught me focus, and when to stop.

Healthcare

Dr Reuter Medical Center

A medical centre, and a lesson in how regulated, trust-heavy businesses are built, and how different their rhythm is from hospitality.

Food & beverage

A seven-brand cloud 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. A fast education in food unit economics and operational complexity.

See the brands →
Fintech

tXPay

A blockchain payments venture built to connect smart contracts with real-world transactions. Early, direct exposure to the economics of moving money, and to how unforgiving a market with the wrong timing can be.

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.