Chesapeake Hospitality was acquired by Remington Hotels, a third-party management platform owned by Ashford Inc., on Monday. The move will provide the company with some needed cash flow to deal with pandemic-related financial hardships, former Chesapeake president and CEO and new division president for Remington Chris Green said.
“As we navigated through the pandemic, I think we did a great job of retaining our staff and keeping our clients’ hotels intact through active cash management, but it was apparent that at some point we were going to have to achieve some scale to be able to rise out of this,” he said.
The cultures of the two companies complement and align with each other, making it a natural fit, Green said. Chesapeake will continue to create asset value by performing rebrandings and repositions, a staple of the company over the years.
“At Chesapeake, we always saw a diamond in the rough in hotels that a lot of people didn't see that through a concerted and focused effort, an above-standard sales approach, marketing approach, a granular focus on driving revenue, and then really on best positioning the hotel in its marketplace to win is how we saw results,” he said. “We've turned around hundreds of hotels over the past 60 years. And in today's environment, you can imagine how valuable that skill set is.”
In a video interview with Hotel News Now prior to the deal at the Hunter Hotel Investment Conference in March, Green said the components that made hotels successful during the pandemic — drive-to locations, the ability to mix business and leisure travel, attractive exterior settings to do food and beverage — is what developers are looking to focus on now.
He said Chesapeake does well in secondary and tertiary markets such as in the suburbs or airports.
“We love hotels in areas that are underserved,” he said. “There’s abilities to go into markets now that really didn’t seem to need a hotel.”
Labor Shortage
Green said the labor shortage is his biggest concern in 2022. With corporate and group travel pace picking up, being able to service all of it will be the biggest challenge moving forward.
Chesapeake has always focused on establishing a good culture, but it can and needs to be better to be proactive in bringing in more employees as business picks up in the second half of the year, Green said.
Labor is "the number one factor, and as an industry, we’ve got to focus on it,” he said. “And I think we are, but it’s going to take thinking outside the box.”
Despite the struggles with staffing, Green said he can see it starting to pick up and looks forward to it being a concern of the past.
“I am seeing signs that we’re starting to be able to hire, and I hope that continues,” he said. “I hope that this is really getting close to the end.”
Culture
In order to establish a culture that prospective employees would want to work for, it takes being authentic and prioritizing doing what’s right rather than what’s best for the company, Green said.
“It takes humility at the leadership level. It’s easy to have a tag line on your website, it’s easy to have words or a credo for your company,” he said. “But if you don’t live it out at the leadership level, it’s fake. People can see right through it.”
He said it takes more than being courteous; actions such as offering better benefits and more time off is what the labor pool desires, so that’s what companies will need to offer. Adjusting and evolving culture with the times is necessary in a time when it's more important than ever to stand out as a place where one would want to work.
“I’ve been in this industry longer than I was not in this industry,” Green said. “So seeing the way things are now, I’m going to have to change my focus and a lot of us in the leadership levels are going to have to go, ‘OK, what can we learn from the millennials? What can we take away?’”
For more from Hotel News Now's conversation with Chris Green, watch the video above.