Giovanna Grossi offered new role to stay with AA

05 September 2016 by Janet Harmer

Giovanna Grossi, group area manager at the AA, is to remain with the guide book publisher in a newly created part-time role, nearly three months after announcing her departure.

In her new position, she will continue her 17-year employment with the AA as chief advisor on awards and quality assessment.

Regarded as a stickler of quality standards and a champion of new culinary talent, Grossi had originally planned to leave the AA at the end of September to explore new career opportunities as well as spend more time with family and friends.

She said that the offer from the AA to continue to work with the group's hotel services, in a part-time advisory and ambassadorial capacity, was a perfect fit for her future plans.

"It allows me to continue to work with and support the amazing business that has come to be my life over the last 17 years and yet also allows me to spend more time with my friends and family, to travel and also to pursue other opportunities that are on my ‘to do list'," she explained.

Grossi's new role will include training and consultancy work for the AA hotel services team, in addition to acting as an ambassador for the organisation and overseeing its awards programme.

Kirsty Lloyd-Jukes, membership services director of the AA, said: "Giovanna has worked passionately for the AA over the past 17 years. I am delighted we have been able to find a new role for her that retains her wisdom and experience within the AA, but also allows her some well-deserved time off."

The announcement that Grossi will remain with the AA follows the unexpected departure of Peter Laigaard Jensen, who left the AA in July just four months after he was appointed to replace Simon Numphud as head of hotel services. According to his LinkedIn profile, Laigaard Jensen is now a director at Copenhagen Strategy Consulting Group. Numphud left the AA in January after 18 years with the company to take up the position of director of sales for independent food procurement company PSL.

An accountancy graduate from Manchester University, Grossi originally joined the AA as a patch inspector in 1999, while working part-time in her family's restaurant business. She went on to become area manager for London and the South East, before being appointed group area manager on 2008.

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