Avion Hospitality’s chief executive said his company will vigorously defend itself against Aimbridge Hospitality’s lawsuit alleging stolen trade secrets and interference with management contracts.
“I am surprised and disappointed by the Aimbridge filing,” Avion President and CEO Robert Burg said in a written statement to Hotel News Now.
“I know firsthand that hospitality management is about relationships and results,” he said. “That is not a trade secret.”
Burg spent nearly two decades at Aimbridge before starting Avion, a third-party management company, in 2022. He served in several roles at Aimbridge, including president and chief operating officer when he left in 2020. Prior to Aimbridge, he worked at what was then called Wyndham International.
He said his current priority remains supporting Avion’s property teams that have driven the company’s growth and ensuring results for hotel owners’ properties.
Aimbridge filed its petition earlier this week with the 471st District Court in Collin County, Texas, where both companies are located. Aimbridge alleges that Burg both before and after launching his new company had reached out to then-current Aimbridge employees to obtain confidential property-level information to gain an advantage in persuading hotel owners to switch management companies. Avion would go on to hire the Aimbridge employees who provided the information.
Aimbridge said it has former employees' emails on its servers as evidence of this communication. Those emails involve the Embassy Suites by Hilton College Station; the Embassy Suites by Hilton Houston West-Katy; the Embassy Suites by Hilton Houston Energy Corridor; the Fairfield Inn & Suites Houston East Energy Corridor; the Home2 Suites by Hilton Houston Energy Corridor; the Hyatt Regency Tulsa Downtown; and the Windsor Court Hotel in New Orleans. All of those hotels left Aimbridge's management for Avion between its founding in 2022 and March 2024.
In a previous interview, Aimbridge Executive Chairman Steve Joyce said his company believes there are more hotels in Avion's portfolio that switched from Aimbridge due to this practice but it doesn't have the email evidence yet.
“When we get into discovery, it’s going to get a lot deeper because we’ll get a lot more information than when we started looking,” he said. “We asked for their information and their emails and their texts.”
*Correction, June 27, 2024: This story has been updated to correct the year when Robert Burg departed Aimbridge Hospitality.