LOS ANGELES—For Mehul Patel, chairman and CEO of NewcrestImage, it’s all about thinking long-term in the hotel industry.
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“If you want to be in business long-term, you have to look at the horizon; you cannot time everything perfectly,” he said in a video interview with Hotel News Now during the Americas Lodging Investment Summit. “When you build a hotel, it takes three to five years. There’s no way to time the cycle. So you have to … self-sustain in good times and bad times, and have the right allocation of capital and cost of doing business and a good operation model and a good brand. If you have these basic items, it doesn’t matter (what part of) the cycle you are in.”
With that long-term investment mindset in place, Patel has big plans to develop the company’s work in modular construction and dual- and tri-brand hotel development projects—two areas where the Texas-based development, construction and management company has seen success.
Branded lifestyle hotels are another big focus for the company. Today, NewcrestImage has 26 hotels open in 10 states, largely concentrated in the Hilton, Marriott International, InterContinental Hotels Group and Hyatt Hotels Corporation brand families.
The company is fitting lifestyle brands such as AC Hotels by Marriott and Canopy by Hilton into many of its dual- and tri-brand and modular construction projects. Last year NewcrestImage developed the AC Hotel by Marriott Oklahoma City Bricktown as the brand’s first modular construction project, and this year the company will open a dual-branded hotel in Cincinnati with the first-ever combination of a Hilton Garden Inn and a Canopy.
“We’re pushing the limit with the brand … trying to say, ‘how can we provide a unique experience for our guest,’” Patel said.
For more on NewcrestImage’s hotel developments in the pipeline, Patel’s thoughts on high-rise modular hotel construction and why he thinks today’s hotel industry is often “too quick to react,” click on the video link above.
*Correction, 13 February 2019: A previous version of this video had the incorrect spelling of a title.