When it comes to managing independent, lifestyle hotels and branded hotels, Coury Holdings is enjoying the best of both worlds.
Dallas-based owner and third-party operator Coury Holdings' long-running Coury Hospitality focuses on lifestyle and soft-branded hotels while its recently launched Concert Hospitality operates more traditionally branded hotels.
Coury Hospitality has a sizable partnership with Marriott International, operating 11 of its Autograph Collection hotels, said Tom Santora, chief growth and strategy officer at Coury Holdings. It has another six signed in various stages of development. By the end of 2026, the company will have more than 10% of all the Autographs in the U.S. under its management.
The soft-brand concept is a “one plus one equals three” situation, he said. Operators have essentially an independent hotel but are tied to the brand’s engine, benefiting from its buying power, loyalty program and global sales, among other factors.
“For us, I think one of our differentiators is that we really like to leverage the brands, meaning using them as much as we can,” he said. “They've got amazing systems.”
While other franchisees may try to work around the brands’ systems to a degree, Coury Hospitality wants to fully use the relationship, particularly when it comes to revenue management, he said.
The local lifestyle
With its lifestyle hotels, Coury Hospitality likes to focus on leading with food and beverage, almost to the point of flipping the hotel model of not being a hotel with a restaurant but multiple restaurants, bars, live music and a speakeasy with hotel rooms, Santora said. There’s also a heavy focus on drawing locals.
“We want to be sort of the living room for the community, targeting 80% to 85% of our business coming from locals,” he said. “Hotel guests always say, ‘Where do the locals go?’ Right here, they’re in the lobby.”
At Coury Hospitality’s Hotel Vin, Autograph Collection in Grapevine, Texas, the hotel hosted a Somm Smackdown, he said. Two master sommeliers paired wines with dishes in a five-course dinner. Attendees picked the wines they felt paired best, and at the end, one of the sommeliers was crowned the champion.
“That takes work. You’ve got to sell tickets. You’ve got to create the event, do all these things,” he said. “That's what is a differentiator for Coury.”
Instead of outsourcing social media engagement, there is a dedicated social media or marketing manager at every hotel, Santora said. There’s someone in every hotel who builds relationships with the local community. One of the company’s brand pillars is called resident experts, and this works toward the goal of having locals and travelers become brand advocates.
“We want them telling their story about our hotel, which is more powerful than buying an ad in the newspaper,” he said.
The hard brands
Concert Hospitality is designed to work in concert with Coury Hospitality, hence its name, Santora said. A developer may have an Autograph and Courtyard by Marriott in need of an operator, but they want a company to manage both, which would lead the developer to choose another company to manage them. Instead of broadening Coury’s focus, the decision was to create Concert to manage the hard brands, from select service up to full.
Coury Hospitality and Concert have separate day-to-day operational teams but have shared oversight, he said.
For Concert, the goal is to work with the same owners who have properties with Coury Hospitality. The other strategy is to use Concert to get a foothold in markets where it doesn’t currently operate to gain expertise in the area.
Many of the hotels it operates are in secondary and tertiary markets where they can be the best in the city, he said.
“It’s unbelievable rate disparity,” he said. “Why would people pay this when they could pay this? Because of all those experiences — culinary, bars, design.”
What’s beneficial by starting in the lifestyle space and moving into the hard brands instead of the other way around is having that established culture of lifestyle hotels and moving it into the hard-brand space, Santora said. A lifestyle-focused culture along with good employees can result in a Courtyard by Marriott hotel — for example — that feels a little extra special.
“It's more about the people and how they're interacting with the guests,” he said. “We think that culture will be the common thread between the two organizations.”
Looking ahead
Coury Hospitality recently took over management of the Beeman Hotel in the Dallas area. It’s currently an independent hotel, but the plan is to reposition it to Marriott’s Tribute soft brand. The company also took over management of the Hall Arts Hotel, Curio Collection by Hilton, in Dallas, as well as the Hall Park Hotel, Autograph Collection in Frisco, Texas.
It has Autograph hotels under development in Colorado Springs; Memphis; and Chisolm Creek, Oklahoma.
The company is fortunate to have the ability to say no to projects, Santora said. It’s not a public company, so it doesn’t need to grow constantly. Any growth is more the result of having relationships with owners.
Coury Hospitality is positioning itself to start its own collection, the Vin Hotel Collection, that would include independent and soft-branded hotels. The first one is in Grapevine, Texas, and the company recently broke ground on another in Rogers, Arkansas, called the Hotel Vin Pinnacle Hills, that should open in the spring of 2027.
The Vin Hotel Collection will be centered around wine and wine education events, allowing it to work in many different locations, he said. Guests can learn more about wines and find other types of wine similar to ones they already like.
“You're trying to develop people's palates,” he said. “That's where it gets fun.”