Iván X. Eskildsen is a Panamanian entrepreneur, former Minister of Tourism, and Founder & Chief Executive Officer of OGAYA, a regenerative travel and hospitality platform dedicated to creating transformational experiences while helping nature and communities flourish.
As Panama’s Minister of Tourism (2019-2023), he led the implementation of the country’s Sustainable Tourism Master Plan 2020–2025. At the heart of the strategy was Hana Ayala’s Tourism–Conservation–Research (TCR) model, which positioned tourism as an economic catalyst for the conservation of Panama’s extraordinary natural and cultural treasures.
Prior to public service, Iván’s career combined finance, investment, real estate, and hospitality development. He served in senior financial roles for prominent Panamanian family offices, overseeing investments across hospitality and real estate, energy, media, agroindustry, and financial assets. He was also Founder and General Manager of Cubitá, a hotel and real estate development in Panama’s Azuero Peninsula conceived around the region’s architecture, history, and living cultural traditions. The project included a 100-room boutique hotel, residences, commercial spaces, a museum, and culturally immersive tourism experiences, and received the SPIA Grand Architecture Award in 2014.
Underlying these professional endeavors is a longstanding personal interest in the relationship between wisdom, culture, and our connection with the natural world. Iván also devoted twelve years to the study and teaching of comparative philosophy and wisdom traditions of East and West. His particular passion for ancestral wisdom has subsequently led him to build relationships with elders and leaders of Panama’s Indigenous communities. Through relationships of trust developed over time, different communities have opened their doors to collaborate with OGAYA and welcome its travelers into meaningful encounters that offer a glimpse into their traditions, relationship with nature, and ways of understanding the world.
Today, through OGAYA, Iván is bringing these different strands together into a broader vision for regenerative travel and hospitality. OGAYA seeks to demonstrate how exceptional hospitality and transformational travel can become economic catalysts for the long-term stewardship of landscapes, the revitalization of local cultures and communities, and deeper connections between ancestral wisdom and modern science.