ATLANTA — Hospitality Ventures Management Group President and CEO Robert Cole said there's two distinct differentiators setting his organization apart from other third-party hotel management and development companies.
Speaking with Hotel News Now during a video interview at the 2023 Hunter Hotel Investment Conference, Cole said his company's centralized talent recruiting process TACOE, which stands for Talent Acquisition Center of Excellence, launched in 2021 and has produced more than 2,000 hourly associates for HVMG's 50-plus hotel portfolio.
"Our goal there was to take a lot of the behind-the-scenes interviews, background checks, sourcing [and] screening off the plates of the [general managers] and their teams, put it on the team of specialists in Atlanta, and serve up very qualified candidates," he said.
TACOE has since allowed general managers and their teams to spend more time accommodating guests and current associates as well as taking sales calls and focusing on revenue, he added.
Another process that HVMG has launched in the past two years that is driving growth for the company is its business intelligence initiative.
"To date, we've spent about half a million dollars behind the scenes, putting together a data warehouse, where we've loaded in about 30 external sources of data ... where now our key stakeholders, our [general managers], our above-property people and soon our owners this year will be able to customize their own reports," he said. "It's going to make life a lot easier, and eventually it's going to lead to us being able to perform predictive analytics across our portfolio."
Over the past two years, HVMG has also focused on growing its full-service and select-service hotel portfolios by adding a total of 23 new hotels. Its pipeline for 2023 so far is 10 hotels, which includes resort hotels, he said.
In terms of whether HVMG would ever consider a possible strategic partnership or a merger or acquisition with another management company, Cole said "we're always opened-minded."
"We keep our doors open; we keep all options open only because [we're] always looking for ways to improve and get better," he said. "The only way we would contemplate or consider any kind of strategic partnership or M&A is if that's going to create value for our owners and our other key stakeholders and our associates."
Hotel Portfolio Performance
Cole said 2022 was a record year for HVMG's portfolio. Its growth in revenue per available room was 10% higher than 2019 levels.
"We grew market share by eight points, which is the best year in our company history, and marked the eighth consecutive year that we've grown ... market share," he said. "If you look at 2023, our first quarter is off to a phenomenal start. We're up 30% over 2022 on a same-store RevPAR basis, which equates to about a 9% increase over 2019."
For more from HNN's conversation with Robert Cole, watch the video above.