PHOENIX — Since being appointed as the chief executive of Hospitality America earlier this year, Ben Campbell and his team have been eyeing serious growth over the next 10 years.
The Greenville, South Carolina-based hotel management company has a portfolio of 18 hotels, but the leadership team wants to roughly double that over the next eight to 10 years, Campbell said in an interview at the recent Lodging Conference.
Hospitality America has opened two properties this year, he said. The company is opening four hotels next year and it has another three scheduled to open in 2026.
Growing the portfolio
Hospitality America’s growth trajectory is in the development space, Campbell said. It’s a smaller company, so when it comes to scalable growth, the plan is to work with hotel owners who are long-term holders. That means working with partners who come in on the development side or are bringing in a group of investors for long-term cash flow.
“We are adding a few ownership groups to our client base, but for the most part, these are legacy ownerships that have seen the value that we have created with them in these hotels and are wanting to do more,” he said.
Some investors want to enter markets that are new to them, and Hospitality America is part of that process as soon as the team is aware, Campbell said. The owner lets Hospitality America know of a piece of land, and the operator assesses the market for the owner, providing guidance up until it’s time to take over management of the new property.
For example, the company recently opened the Motto by Hilton Bentonville Downtown in Arkansas, the fifth Motto in the U.S. and one of the first ground-up builds, he said. It has been working on that project with its development partner, Windsor Aughtry Company, since 2018.
Hospitality America does invest in the properties it manages, Campbell said. It depends on the opportunity, but it invests with all of its legacy owners.
“We have a sizable investment in all of their assets,” he said. “Some of our newer clients, we’re building those relationships, and it depends on the opportunity. Some we do just to get the relationship started, but we do invest. Not in all, but most.”
Hospitality America has four hotels in its development pipeline, all Tapestry by Hilton properties, he said. The developer is traditional, so Hospitality America has been driving the marketing and brand creation process.
“It’s us driving identifying who that guest is based on the market and how we are delivering that experience down channel from when they arrive to the property,” he said.
The first to open will be in Rogers, Arkansas, with 175 keys, he said. The others will be in Springdale, Arkansas, and Germantown, Tennessee, with the fourth still to be announced.
The Southeast is Hospitality America’s primary geographic focus in the U.S., but it stretches as far north as Chicagoland and as far west as Kansas City, Campbell said. He wants to grow the company's hotel portfolio west of the Mississippi and continue its trajectory from Arkansas westward. Hospitality America is looking at submarkets in Texas primarily along with some in Oklahoma, staying away from major metropolitan areas. The company is looking at markets with authentic experiences for travelers, such as Greenville, South Carolina; Columbia, South Carolina; and Roanoke, Virginia.
“Those markets are markets that we do well in, that people can get unique experiences that they're craving,” he said. “They’re markets that generally are set up for good business environments.”
Hospitality America’s management portfolio has only branded hotels, and its strongest relationships are with Hilton and Marriott International, Campbell said. The brands and loyalty programs continue to acquire guests at a rapid pace, making them attractive partners.
Independents can offer great, unique experiences, but the brands have been adapting to this space with their soft-brand collections to offer brand benefits alongside unique independent experiences for guests, he said.
Business intelligence
To go along with its portfolio growth, Hospitality America is growing internally, launching its own business intelligence department to be led by Wes Cargen. For the past 10 years, the organization has been focusing on its tech stack, but now it’s taking it a step further by taking all its data and controlling it in its own environment, Campbell said.
It will have business intelligence dashboards for its on-property teams and, eventually, an AI platform for general managers to use to simplify their day-to-day decisions, he said. They’ll be able to consult the platform for staffing levels, revenue forecasting, guest-service experiences based on correlations across the whole ecosphere of hospitality to optimize operations.
General managers can look at their forecasts for the day and understand their top 10 arriving guests, Campbell said. They can see the next 30, 60 and 90 days and lay out their forecast. For example, if the hotel is going to enter into a slower season, the platform can tell the general manager how much staffing the hotel will need.
“These are all things that our [general managers] are doing on a day-to-day that are ancillary, that they're having to make decisions subjectively on,” he said. “We're trying to put an actual, quantifiably objective forecast onto it.”
The goal is to make general managers as efficient at their jobs as possible, Campbell said. The largest generation to enter the workforce, the baby boomers, is now retiring. Gen Z, the smallest, is entering the workforce and replacing the boomers. That dynamic of having fewer people in the market means making those working as efficient at their jobs as possible.
“At the end of the day, as much as our industry has tried to look at how you can have tech clean a room, it’s really difficult to make that more efficient than a human,” he said.
That means leadership must be as efficient as possible to make the best decision they can as quickly as they can, he said. To accomplish this, using AI can help find data points that correlate to assist with that decision.
That doesn’t mean leaving the decision up to AI, though.
“I don’t ever see a future where that will happen, but just like with our revenue management systems that we have today, we’re looking at algorithms that are built based upon regressions of different behaviors that actually do correlate,” he said.