In 2025, Concord Hospitality will celebrate 40 years of hotel operations, ownership and development, and President and CEO Mark Laport has been around for all of it.
Speaking on the latest episode of the Hotel News Now podcast, Laport said he looks back on the four decades of growing his company with pride, noting they've done it in a thoughtful way. The Raleigh, North Carolina-based company has grown from a single hotel to 150.
"There was very much an incremental growth strategy," he said. "The good news is our earliest years were successful in a small way, and we simply built upon that. I like to say ours is a success of incrementality. One step at a time. No big portfolio acquisitions, but very much masters of what we like to call the one-off."
Concord's second-in-command, Chief Operating Officer Will Loughran, has significantly less time with the company — he joined roughly seven months ago after a decade leading Evolution Hospitality. He believes 2025 will be a strong year for his new company, and not just a big anniversary to take a victory lap.
"I think we're in kind of a nice little window — it's going to be a small window on the supply side [since] development over the last couple of years has definitely slowed and not been as robust as it has been in the past," he said. "So we have a nice little window from the supply side. We're seeing nominal [revenue per available room] growth, but we do see hotels stabilizing. We do see group business coming back, [business transient] coming back, and that's all very favorable."
For all of HNN's discussion with Concord's Laport and Loughran, listen to the podcast above.
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