While James Bermingham’s success as Virgin Hotels’ new CEO will depend on his brand’s ability to penetrate some of the most competitive hotel markets in America, his exuberance towards meeting this goal was manifested long ago across the Pond.

“I was born and raised in Dublin, and lived in London,” Bermingham said in reference to Sir Richard Branson and his London-based Virgin Group of companies. “I’ve always been an admirer of his approach to people, product and planet.”

Bermingham, who took the Virgin Hotels CEO post in early March after almost two decades with luxury hotel company Montage Hotels & Resorts, can’t afford to waste any time applying that approach. Having opened its fourth property in Nashville last July, Virgin Hotels soft-opened its 1,500-room Las Vegas hotel at the site of the former Hard Rock Hotel in late March, and its official grand opening is set for June. The company will also debut its New Orleans property this summer and will open a 463-room, glass-clad new-build hotel in New York by early next year. The brand’s first non-U.S. property is slated to open in Edinburgh next spring.

All the while, Bermingham looks to maintain the brand’s hallmarks, whether they be the hotels’ multi-section guest “chambers” where the bedrooms can be closed off from bathrooms and closets, its Commons Club restaurant and lounge, its Funny Library coffee shop, the red-and-white color motif, or the brand’s vow to avoid price-gauging via guest perks like free parking at the Las Vegas hotel and mini-bar items available at local convenience store prices.

In the post-COVID-19 age, Bermingham is also counting on the hotel brand’s “Lucy” smartphone app to help set the brand apart from other lifestyle brands by enabling guests to minimize contact through the app’s remote check-in, keyless room access and in-room controls.

“We’ve proven during the last eight to 12 months how effectively we can operate and deliver the experience in the COVID environment,” he said. “The quality of our protocols is really tried and tested.”

Virgin Hotels is scaling up just as the U.S. hotel industry appears to be edging its way back towards normalcy. For the first quarter, U.S. hotel revenue per available room was $46.16 per night on a 46.5% occupancy rate and an average daily rate of $99.35, according to STR, CoStar's hospitality analytics firm. While RevPAR represented a 42% drop from the pre-pandemic period of first-quarter 2019, first-quarter RevPAR was still up about $1 a night from last year. And for the week ended May 1, U.S. RevPAR had increased to $62.13 as occupancy hit 57%.

Chekitan Dev, Singapore Tourism distinguished professor in Asian Hospitality Management at Cornell University's School of Hotel Administration in the SC College of Business, said Bermingham has as two-part challenge ahead.

"Imbue Virgin Hotels with the flawless operations excellence that Montage is known for and, at the same time, keep Virgin Hotels’ iconoclastic and irreverent image distinct from every other hotel brand," he said. “Virgin’s timing is perfect as the cracks have begun to show in some legacy hotel brands, and independent hotels are hurting."

Bermingham, 55, is counting on Virgin Hotels’ future to be brighter than its past. In 2011, the company partnered with a Chicago developer to acquire the Old Dearborn Bank Building with plans to open the brand’s first property there in 2013. At the time, Virgin Hotels also said that hotels in Los Angeles, New York, Miami, San Francisco, Washington and London were in development, along with planning more growth with an asset-light strategy in which Virgin Hotels would bring in developers to build and own the hotels while the brand would manage them. Virgin Hotels was also counting on the network of Virgin-branded airlines to help promote the new hotel brand.

But the brand lost one of those airlines when Alaska Airlines acquired Virgin America in 2016 and phased out the brand by 2019. Meanwhile, the Chicago property didn’t open until early 2015, and the brand’s next two properties — in San Francisco and Dallas — didn’t open until 2019. Additionally, after the San Francisco hotel shut down to meet the pandemic stay-at-home protocol that the city enacted in March 2020, the San Francisco hotel’s owner terminated Virgin Hotels’ management contract. In turn, Virgin Hotels sued the hotel owner last May for allegedly wrongly terminating the contract.

“From a market-penetration standpoint, [the hotel] did very well. The intent to unlawfully terminate the management agreement gave us no option,” Bermingham said of the lawsuit. “San Francisco is an important market. Absolutely, we will be in that market at some point in the future.”

The next step in that future is the official grand opening of Virgin Hotels Las Vegas, which was redeveloped from the former Hard Rock Hotel by JC Hospitality Partners and includes restaurants such as Nobu and Los Angeles-based Thai food offshoot Night + Market, in addition to the Commons Club and Funny Library.

Fletch Brunelle, vice president of marketing for the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, said Virgin Hotels brought a different property into the market than what was there.

“It’s a unique offering," he said.

The next property scheduled to open is the 225-room Virgin Hotels New Orleans, which is due to open in August. And by early next year, the 463-room Virgin Hotels New York, which is being built by the Lam Group, will open in Manhattan’s NoMad district.

While acknowledging the twin challenges of expanding a brand in the wake of a pandemic and establishing a foothold in markets such as Las Vegas and New York, both Bermingham and Dev indicated that the combination of Virgin’s global presence and consumers’ willingness to explore newer brands when resuming travel may work to the brand’s advantage.

“Opening in two hyper-competitive markets will help Virgin iron out any kinks it has in its marketing and operations models to help it enter other markets,” Dev said. “Plus, these two hotels will serve as living billboards to increase awareness and offer proof of concept to hotel owners and guests.”

Bermingham added that the brand is seeing "a pretty extraordinary desire to travel."

“Every Virgin company scales, and usually scales fast. That’s going to happen," he said.