Inside My Place Hotels’ Extended Stay Growth Strategy

Glenn: [00:00:00] Hey, everybody. It’s your hospitality friend, Glenn here in Fort Lauderdale to My Place of America’s Hospitality conference. I’m excited because I got Ryan Rivett with me. You know him as president and CEO and I know him as one cool dude. How are you doing, man?

Ryan: [00:00:12] I’m doing awesome, Glenn. It’s such a great energy here. It’s such a great energy. And what’s really cool is you meet every other year. So the companies made so much progress in the last couple of years. And it feels like you’ve gone from infancy to toddler state to a rambunctious teen right about now. That’s about how I feel too. It’s chaotic, but it’s a lot of fun.

Glenn: [00:00:31] So what’s it like now, finally entering the hospitality zeitgeist? People are taking you very, very seriously and you’re in conversations now that I hadn’t heard before.

Ryan: [00:00:41] Well, it’s a, it’s a big responsibility, actually. I think you start to feel as you mature and we’re getting to a place where we are kind of in the zone. We’re in the sweet spot here in our industry answering the questions, making sure everybody’s completely informed as to what it is that we provide and how we do things for them is really important. And what’s really interesting is as people are thinking of doing investments, you’re making a lot easier. Back in June at the NYU Hospitality Conference, you were telling me about how you’re kind of creating more vertically integrated strategies.

Glenn: [00:01:10] So me not knowing anything could just say, hey, and you could basically take me from the hey to hello to the guests on the opening day.

Ryan: [00:01:19] Right, right. And I think we’ve always been focused on vertical integration. We’ve always had that as an element of our culture at the fundamentally, we are owners, operators, developers, and in the hotel space, the franchise vehicle is really our way of taking what we’re good at to the masses. Right? And so keeping those things incorporated into the franchise system and continuing to, to grow farther into that incorporation is really important in taking center stage in 2016.

[00:01:45] Yeah, for sure. And as an extended stay continues to become an even increasingly more vibrant part of the hospitality industry. What I love about your strategy is that you’re going to the places where a lot of others aren’t. So not only do you have your great product, but you’re going to you’re going to places where they don’t even want to deal with. Well, it’s opportunity, right?

Ryan: [00:02:02] Right. Yeah. You never overlook an opportunity. It doesn’t matter whether it’s in the smallest community in the US or in one of the major metros. I know, so anything else that you want to say before we wrap up here at your, at your big every other year? You know, I wish that everybody, all of your followers were here with us at this deal.

Glenn: [00:02:18] That would be pretty wild. It would be, it’d be a lot of fun. So that’s what we’re looking forward to in the future. This has been a great event. We’ve got such great partners and franchisees. I’ve had some great questions today, and I’ve always been able to point them towards one, two, three, four, five of our franchisees and say, why don’t you go ask them? Don’t listen to me. Ask them. And it’s been a great time. Awesome.

Glenn: [00:02:36] Well, I’m sure you sold out the hotel room now, and in two years from now, maybe we’ll sell out Venetian Las Vegas. There you go. That big. Right? It’s only 7000 rooms. No, no, we can figure that out. Awesome. Well, continued. Congratulations. I love following this story and seeing how everything is going. And phenomenal keynote this morning. Really looking forward to that. Thank you. Yeah. I’m excited. I appreciate it and thank you for the plug. And thank you for making it all the way to the end. As a reward, I’d like to ask you like, share, subscribe, all that kind of good stuff for Ryan and myself. See you next time. See you.