In the CEO role for nearly one month, Aimbridge Hospitality's Craig Smith is determined to recast the company's size to its advantage while thinking "like a small company that's really dedicated to each owner and each hotel."

Over the last month, Smith has been meeting with owners, property teams and brands from some of the more than 1,500 hotels under Aimbridge management, along with his corporate teams. It's all in effort to learn more about the company he’s leading, what needs to change and what should stay the same.

On April 11, Hotel News Now moderated a virtual fireside chat with Smith that was live streamed to Aimbridge’s hotel owners and associates. This article includes his answers in that fireside chat, a live Q&A with the audience and an exclusive interview with HNN following the chat.

Smith took the CEO role in mid-March for Aimbridge, the world's largest third-party hotel management company, following the departure of Mike Deitemeyer at the end of 2023.

The majority of Smith's career has been with Marriott International. After more than 30 years with Marriott, he retired from the company in February 2023 as group president and managing director, international.

Some of the feedback that Smith has received so far is that Aimbridge isn’t using its size to its advantage.

“We can’t talk about size being the advantage,” he said. “You have to use your size to create an advantage.”

Aimbridge needs to move away from quoting its size, because even though it’s the largest hotel management company in the industry, bigger doesn’t equal better, Smith said. With that in mind, Aimbridge is readjusting its operating model so that its regional vice presidents and their teams will be able to visit properties 12 times a year now. That creates more opportunities for hotel general managers to meet with their executives and learn from them directly.

“If their boss is only visiting them a couple of times a year, then they have less opportunity to learn and to be held accountable for what they’re doing,” he said.

The hotel’s director of finance is not going to learn from the general manager because their jobs are different, Smith said. Having finance executives work on a geographical territory will help hotel teams by answering their questions and fixing problems.

“At the end of the day, it’s about mentoring and development,” he said.

Senior leadership needs to get out into the hotels because visiting them lets them hear what’s going on, Smith said. He wants to flatten the organization to have more people closer to the business, not adding more layers in between.

“We’ve got to think like a small, third-party management company and less like a large company,” he said. “In other words, we use our scale for things that are important to us, but our [thinking] has to be almost like a small company that’s really dedicated to each owner and each hotel.”

Having a greater focus on hotel general managers is an important part of the overall strategy, Smith said. When he was an area vice president at Marriott, he had oversight of 25 hotels. It took Smith about six months to figure out that 80% of his time was spent on 20% of those hotels, and those were the ones with poor general managers.

“The truth of the matter is, if you center everything around that general manager, they’ll make everything work on property,” he said.

There’s a tendency for all companies to get ahead of themselves and forget what their business is all about, Smith said.

“Our business is all about making every single general manager successful, whether that’s developing them for the future, training them when they’re already a general manager,” he said. “I think there’s a lot in there, and that alone will actually solve many more other potential issues in the future.”

Aimbridge's financial situation has fueled a lot of behind-the-scenes industry chatter, as people wonder whether it has overextended itself to fuel its growth.

But when asked about it, Smith said Aimbridge doesn’t have a financial problem.

“There’s a big difference between having a financial problem and not hitting your long-term goals,” he said. “I’d say for me, it’s more about OK, how do we turbo-charge the organization to move faster?”

As for rumors about layoffs, Smith said that right now, he doesn't see cuts happening in the future. When he talks about flattening the organization, Smith said he doesn’t mean it in the way other executives do when they’re referring to cutting back.

“I’m talking about redistributing people and getting them closer [to property level],” he said.

To improve Aimbridge’s accounting, the company hired an outside consultant. Smith said one of his biggest realizations is the disconnect between corporate and hotel accounting.

He said one of the biggest realizations is that there’s been a disconnect between corporate and hotel accounting. The consultant has taken a few teams at the corporate level and shown them how accounting works on property so there’s a better understanding how it works and how corporate can better serve properties. Thus, that accounting responsibility is taken off the plate of general managers, who can focus on hotel operations.

Property audits are another new initiative starting under Smith's leadership. They're designed to analyze a hotel in different ways, then go over the results with the hotel's management team, identify goals and loop in ownership.

“It’s not an audit to catch some of what they’ve done wrong,” Smith said. “It’s an audit to say, here are areas where you can improve and let me teach you how to do that.”

He said he draws on his experience restructuring audits at Marriott. Bridging that gap between the property and corporate leadership is a critical step, he said, because it helps both groups learn from each other to improve the hotel.

“I think that’s a big piece that has been missing: We need to listen more to the leaders in the field and then structure our corporate headquarters so that we’re actually listening to them and saying, ‘What do we need to do to help you make the hotels more efficient, more successful, drive more top line, drive more bottom line?’” he said.

Building a better internal talent pipeline is another priority, particularly for general manager roles.

Smith said it's been upsetting to learn how often certain positions are filled through external hiring rather than promoting from within.

“We’ve got to get the point that we’re growing our own talent,” he said.

As a result, the company has set a goal that 75% of its future general managers will be sourced internally, he said.

Someone can interview well for a general manager job or a director of finance or sales position in a hotel, but the chances of success are better if that person already works for the company where there’s firsthand knowledge of their work and training, Smith said.

Building a solid talent pipeline at the property level also helps solidify job satisfaction and lower turnover. He cited general manager turnover as a particularly terrible thing for hotels, since it dings performance, the team loses a leader, and finding a new person takes valuable time.

Aimbridge's job, he said, is to put general managers in place and make sure they're happy, while finding the next wave of leaders and developing their skills.

He drew on his own experience to illustrate how important it is to build and retain talent in one place.

“I didn’t have to go anywhere else to get promoted,” he said of his career at Marriott. “I didn’t have to quit Marriott and go to another company.”

And Aimbridge's size is definitely an advantage when it comes to giving new hospitality employees experience in many types of hotel jobs that they might otherwise need to company-hop to get.

“Imagine you can do it all in one company,” he said. “This is where our size is a competitive advantage. Because we're large enough that we can say, ‘Listen, you can work in a select-service hotel and become a general manager and then transfer to a full-service hotel.”

Aimbridge’s overall staffing should be one of its three biggest competitive advantages, Smith said.

Turnover at Aimbridge is down, and it’s trending in the right direction again, he said. The company will continue to focus on retaining talent. A lot of people are retiring out of the workforce, and everyone is competing for good talent.

In recent years, Aimbridge initiated several employee-oriented programs as part of its attraction and retention efforts. It offers daily pay, allowing all employees to request up to 50% of their earned hours in their wages anytime during that pay period. It also provides flexible scheduling to employees and, in certain markets with enough property density, shift sharing in which employees of one hotel can pick up hours at another nearby Aimbridge-managed hotel.

These strategies help the company stay ahead of the curve, something Smith said is critical. He's particularly excited about apprenticeship programs, which he called a helpful career path for young adults not pursuing four-year degrees, and other people a chance to retool their skills in order to change careers.

“We need to train people for jobs in the future,” he said.

Labor issues are top of mind for company's Aimbridge's size.

The company recently has run into challenges negotiating a new contract with Unite Here Local 11 for several of its hotels in the Los Angeles area. In January 2024, Aimbridge signed a memorandum of understanding with Unite Here Local 11 for six properties. Later that month, the union announced a boycott campaign against Aimbridge-managed hotels in the area.

When asked about the status of its negotiations, Smith said Aimbridge is focused on being a good steward of its hotels. The main things are doing what’s best for the owners of its hotels while also protecting the people that work for Aimbridge.

“If it’s a union hotel, then how do we work with the union?” he said. “Instead of fighting them, how do we work with them to figure out what is best for the people that work for them?”

Aimbridge has a responsibility to the hotel owners to make sure the properties are represented properly, he said. It also must make sure the associates working for Aimbridge are treated fairly and are taken care of well.

When asked for comment on its negotiations and allegations of sexual harassment six female employees reported at two Aimbridge-managed hotels, Unite Here Local 11 co-President Kurt Petersen said in a statement that it was “despicable” how Aimbridge’s leadership is drawing out the labor dispute and not taking these accusations seriously.

 
“If dozens of other bigger and more popular hotel brands can agree to give their workers the Olympic wages and protections they deserve, then Aimbridge should be no different,” he said. “Moreover, the ridiculous response to the letter sent to the CEO after women came forward is a clear example of how the company does not value workers or women.”

When asked about the sexual harassment allegations, Aimbridge released a statement saying, “Every day we set out to create a safe, healthy, and positive work environment for our associates, and will not stand for harassment of any kind. As soon as allegations were brought to our attention, we immediately launched a thorough investigation and took actions reflective of our zero-tolerance policy.”

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