LOS ANGELES — With ten hotels open, Soul Community Planet has moved through its "proof of concept" stage and is ready for its next growth phase, SCP co-founder and CEO Ken Cruse said.
"We spent a fairly lengthy amount of time figuring out exactly how to calibrate this brand, and now that we're at a point where we think we know what works and what doesn't work, we're going to scale in a thoughtful but much more proactive way," he said in a podcast interview with HNN at the Americas Lodging Investment Summit.
SCP is a Laguna Beach, California-based owner and operator of lodges and boutique hotels under its SCP Hotels brand. The company started in 2018 with the idea of creating a new concept in hospitality that's oriented around holistic hospitality, Cruse said. The three values the company built its brand around are wellness, social good and regenerative travel.
SCP Hotels currently has a portfolio of 10 hotels. Four are in California, three are in Oregon and there is one hotel each in Colorado, Hawaii and Costa Rica.
The brand appeals to conscious consumers, something that 9 out of 10 Americans identify as, Cruse said. Younger consumers, however, not only identify with the label but act on it, too. As a result, SCP Hotels' guest age demographic fits mostly between those 25 to 50.
As for what Cruse would consider to be an SCP market, it's an ill-defined concept, he said. It's a place where guests will embrace the idea of wellness, social good and sustainability in a thoughtful way. The company looks for existing hotels that are in some shape or form not positioned correctly for the market. It typically pursues smaller boutique properties in downtown areas of small towns as well as hotels in coastal markets.
"If we're going to a smaller market with a smaller hotel, we'll typically try to assemble over the course of time multiple hotels into that portfolio so we can more or less then theoretically create an institutional-scale hotel out of a bunch of non-institutional-scale individual properties," he said.
For more from the interview with SCP Hotels' Ken Cruse, listen to the podcast above.
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