A desire to manage more non-traditional lodging accommodations has led Remington Hotels to rebrand as Remington Hospitality.
Now one year since the Dallas-based third-party management company acquired and fully integrated with third-party management company Chesapeake Hospitality, executives at Remington said it's the ideal time to reimagine the combined company's focus.
In an exclusive interview with Hotel News Now, Remington Hospitality CEO Sloan Dean said the company is focued on four key pillars: classic brand accommodations, independent hotels and resorts, beverage and food, spa and wellness, and glamping and nontraditional projects.
"We're getting more and more into non-traditional lodging, and so the noun 'hotels' seemed a little too isolated or too specific," he said. "We've got several glamping projects here in the states as well as in Costa Rica and Mexico that we're partners on. It's non-traditional lodging; it's more eco-tourism. We thought that 'hospitality' was better suited if we're getting into that type of management."
Much of this is shift is driven by consumer desires for more unique and local travel experiences, he added. But there's also an investor need for it as construction costs are higher now than ever.
"The non-traditional lodging, for example, really the thesis there is that you can actually drive a higher [average daily rate] and the cost to build for some of these projects is actually cheaper than a fixed hotel. A lot of the units are [prefabricated] in Mexico. You can be all in for $200,000 a key in Costa Rica or Mexico, whereas if you're doing new-construction building vertically, you'd be looking at $300,000-$350,000 a key," he said.
In addition to lower construction costs, Dean said the reason for expanding this endeavor beyond the United States is that glamping and eco-tourism can be limited to certain markets in the states.
"It's only certain markets where there's an outdoor tourism component that we're seeing. In the U.S., it's Sedona or Joshua Tree and certain parts of Austin. Costa Rica and Mexico are set up really well for it and certain parts of the Caribbean," he added.
Of the dozen active deals Remington Hospitality has across the Caribbean, Costa Rica, Mexico, Grand Cayman and Dominican Republic, two are all-inclusive, Dean said. Remington Hospitality is not yet disclosing who its partners are on these deals.
As more hotel brands and companies enter the all-inclusive resort segment, Remington President Chris Green said his company is capable of managing this hotel type.
"One of the things that Sloan has been great about in leading our vision is ensuring that we're capable of fulfilling that vision," he said. "With the projects we're working on, we looked inside to make sure 'Do we have the talent base, do we have the knowledge?' If you look historically, Remington has always run highly complex, high-volume hotels all over the country. We understand the resort space, we understand wellness, so it just made sense to move where our people and our capabilities were going to make us successful. It's not like we have a portfolio of select-service hotels and all of a sudden we are moving into the Caribbean and the resorts and wellness. The rebranding is about us speaking to the market in such a way that they understand we're here for this type of opportunity and we're capable."
Dean said his team was intentional in picking the locations for these deals. One reason is that the demand base at resorts across Latin America is largely U.S. consumers.
Remington's competitors took big leaps jumping into Europe, Asia and Africa for expansion, he said.
"One of the things that we really liked about the Caribbean and Central America is we understand the U.S. consumer really well. At a lot of these resorts, the No. 1 consumer base is the U.S. consumer. They stay longer, they spend more on average than a European and even a South American traveler."
Part of Remington's strategy is taking existing hotels where the consumer base is more heavily weighted toward Europeans and flipping the marketing more toward U.S. consumers, he said.
"That's one of the things that [made us attractive] as a management partner of some of these Caribbean and Latin American capital partners, is that we really understand how to market to the U.S. consumer," Dean added.
As an example, the demand base at one of its all-inclusive deals in the Dominican Republic consists of consumers from Poland, Spain or South America. He said that demographic favors more midscale to economy hotels.
"The hotel is not doing well from an ADR perspective, the spa doesn't give a lot of contribution, and it's because of the consumer base they have in the hotel," he said. "That's where having a U.S.-based management company that runs a lot of independent resorts in the U.S. ... some of that same skill set applies if you're marketing a resort in Mexico, Costa Rica or the Dominican Republic, for example."
Looking Ahead
Dean said he ultimately hopes for Remington Hospitality to be the best lodging accommodations operator in the Americas.
"When I took over Jan. 1, 2018, we had three owners and about 85 hotels [in the portfolio]. We were a solid manager but not as well-known," he said. "We wanted to be the best operator in the U.S. Fast-forward to today, thanks in part to the integration of Chesapeake Hospitality, we manage for 38 different capital partners and have 130 hotels all in the U.S. What the next five years [looks like] is that we want to be the best complicated operator in the Americas — all way from Canada down to Argentina. We think we can do that from a hub in Dallas."
Green said Remington's transformation shows it doesn't embark on anything unless it can execute it.
"It's easy to be average, and we're not going to be average. As we move forward, it just makes sense to embolden our presence in hospitality, that's what this business is and that's who we are as an organization," he said. "We are not just one thing anymore, we're a lot of things to a lot of people, and we perform really well. I think we see the U.S. traveler and the international traveler really leaning into this space that we're going to be in: the wellness space, the all-inclusive space, the resort space and the upper-upscale and luxury independent space. It's where travelers are moving, and that's where we're moving as well."