Alex Polizzi

Award-winning hotelier Alex Polizzi and her mother, Olga, who have become equal business partners, start work on a sweeping renovation project at their 37-bedroom medieval coaching inn in east Sussex.

Every year, many people decide to open a hotel or guest house, but getting started in this business is anything but easy. Each standalone episode follows the whole journey of one couple or family's project. From finding the perfect location, through the renovation and the make or break first weeks of running the business. From the daring families investing every penny to build a seaside guesthouse, to urbanites swapping their city home for a sprawling, derelict chateau in France, and the drama of overrun projects and mounting over spend. How will they fair in this new adventure of a lifetime as they aim to fulfil their hotel ambition?

Alex visits different gastropubs, country inns, city bistros and coastal hotels around the country that are looking for a new chef to transform their kitchen.

Alex Polizzi works to get jobless military veterans off the civvy-street scrapheap, fighting for employers to recognise highly skilled military skillsets in men too often dismissed as mad, bad or sad.

The show follows Alex Polizzi as she travels across Italy, exploring the country from the North to the South. She heads to famous Italian cities such as Venice, Milan and Rome and also visits the Puglia coast.

Hotel Inspector Alex Polizzi finds out what has since happened to some of the struggling hoteliers she helped previously.

Entrepreneur Alex Polizzi turns her attention to family firms that have reached breaking point. She tackles both their financial failures and domestic dramas and tries to guide them back on to the path to success. From siblings struggling to find common ground to mothers incapable of handing over the reins, Alex must take on the toughest family trials and get them back into the black. As a third generation hotelier of the internationally-renowned Forte family, Alex worked with her mother in the family firm whilst also managing a successful, multi-million pound bakery with her husband. More than most she's aware of the challenges that running a family business brings and understands exactly what's at stake when a family firm starts to struggle. Each week, she'll invest her time, knowledge and expertise in a different family-run firm, identifying their most pressing business shortcomings and forcing them to work as a team to get their house in order.

The show sees Ruth Watson and Alex Polizzi offering help and advise to different hotel owners on how to turn around the fortunes of there ailing establishments.