Whether it's a new-build property or a 100-year hotel that has witnessed history, storytelling is what sets boutique hotels apart from branded properties.

During the "Staying Independent in a Very Corporate World" panel at the online 2021 Women in Travel & Hospitality Conference by TIEWN, Moniqua Lane, owner of The Downtown Clifton hotel and forthcoming Citizen Hotel, both in Tucson, Arizona, said her decision to open independent hotels was dictated by location.

Both properties are "buried in the residential heart of downtown" Tucson right around the central business district, she said.

"It never occurred to me to try to have a branded hotel," she said. "The property [and] the neighborhood lent itself to an independent. I love being independent. The costs associated with a flag [were] something I couldn't do at the time and I've never looked back. I don't think I would ever do anything other than an independent hotel. I'm really happy with the choice that was given to me."

While Lane takes pride in her independent properties, she said financing for the first one was "incredibly difficult."

"We went through 15 different lenders before I found one. And even that was based on the strength of my contractor's decision, my architect's decision, consultants I was working with. It was incredibly hard to finance an independent hotel," she said.

Financing for the second hotel was easier because Lane had a good track record as an independent owner, she said.

"It was difficult, but it gets easier once you start doing it," Lane added.

Nashville is an "explosive market" that's growing at an exponential rate and only has a few independent hotels, said Dee Patel, managing director at The Hermitage Hotel in Nashville.

Having one of the few luxury independent hotels in the city is an "important asset to how we position ourselves" and stand out among the many branded hotels in the city, she said.

"A 100-year old hotel has a sense of place. It's the pride of the city. ... There's been so many moments that the community has experienced, business has experienced, travel has experienced that allows us to be creative. It allows us to be adaptive. It allowed us last year to stay open," she said.

The pandemic also presented an opportunity for completing a property renovation her team had been planning for, Patel said.

"It allowed us to see the glass half full. We saw the silver lining of the pandemic and took the opportunity to start turning on all of our levers to start our renovation process program that we had planned to do over a course of time," she said.

A big part of operating a successful independent hotel is telling its story, said moderator Andrea Foster, senior vice president of Marcus Hotels & Resorts.

Storytelling is done in many ways at The Hermitage Hotel, given its historic place in the community, Patel said.

She shared the example of how the hotel celebrated the 100th anniversary of women's right to vote in 2020. The hotel was a hotbed of activity during the ratification of the 19th Amendment since Tennessee was the final state needed to "vote pro-suffrage," Patel said.

"The Hermitage Hotel became the epicenter for several weeks while the two sides duked it out. So the hustle and the bustle within the walls of this hotel for eight weeks included collusion and bribery, and the fight and the grit that these women had to try to push this vote forward so they could have a seat at the table," she said.

• Read "An Election Story About Vote-Flipping and a Hotel" from the HNN blog.

Patel said working at the hotel as managing director is a great honor because she's the first female managing director in the history of this hotel.

"That to me was the biggest honor to be able to celebrate such a momentous moment in our nation's history," she said.

To tell the story of those events, the hotel did tours, created an exhibit in the lobby that pays homage to its history, and created a cocktail menu honoring key suffrage leaders.

Lane decided to build both of her properties from the ground up and said she found inspiration for the hotels "in her own backyard."

"Both of my hotels really speak to their very particular place," she said. "To downtown Tucson with the Downtown Clifton and then to the high Sonoran Desert with the Citizen Hotel, which will have an active wine cellar in its basement that gets its grapes from the Sonoran Desert surrounding us."

The hotels take branding inspiration from the surrounding Tucson area, but design inspiration came from other companies, hotels and cities or states, Lane said. For Citizen Hotel, Lane said she drew inspiration from Bunkhouse Group's Texas properties and from one hotel in Palm Springs.

She also found inspiration for her properties in Patel's Hermitage hotel to "understand you could have those independent, truly luxury ... and historic hotels. To understand those could exist and those could be ... gemstones in an area, in the crown of a downtown," she said.

Lane said she had a woman as a real estate mentor, who helped her decide to build new hotels.

Lane's mentor expressed to her that, "if you don't pull hotels from the ground up, you're not a real real estate developer."

"I know people disagree with that. That's sort of been my animus. I just find it to be a lot of fun," she said. "I think it's challenging, I think it's interesting, I think it's exciting.

"Ground-up construction or adaptive reuse — particularly complex adaptive reuse, like converting an old building into a new one — is this interesting clash of where your ideal, your dream and your plan to make money and the real physical world all meet in a sometimes beautiful, sometime hideous train wreck, and I think that's fun and I think that's exciting."