Why Independent Hotels Outperform Brands | Tom Luersen, CoralTree Hospitality

Glenn: Hey, everybody. It’s your hospitality. Friend Glenn here at the lodging conference. Although I suspect by the time you’re watching this, I’m home taking a nap. I got Tom Larson with me and Carl, too. But first, I want to thank our friends over at Unifocus. Unifocus technology that drives value. Check them out. Unifocus.com save that money. Tom, how are you doing? Great.

Tom: Great to see you. Glad to be here. It’s good to great conference.

Glenn: Great to see you too. Yeah. There’s so much positive energy here. I’ve been a little nervous and all of that. But what I love about our spirit and our business is no matter what challenges there are, solutions are shortly behind it and usually breaks through for a new wave of innovation. Right.

Tom: I think that’s awesome. I’ve listened to you in your session, by the way. You did a fabulous job. I just told you you brought all this positive energy and it’s needed because there’s some, you know, noise in the market, right? And at the end of the day, we’ve got to see ourselves through it and get on the other side of it.

Glenn: So how are you thinking then on the other side of it, when we talk about consumers, how are they thinking about brands versus independents? And then conversely, how are you thinking about that? I think.

Tom: It.

Glenn: All starts.

Tom: Not necessarily with brand or independent. It starts with the guest. Right. And the conversation is all about the experience. So if we can talk to the guests about the experiences, then all of a sudden you can back into what am I trying to achieve? For? I am so brands are there, they’re prolific, they’re continuing to grow. It had some more announcements this week with some more brands. And at the same level, the independents are outperforming the brands on metric bases across the country. So there is an interesting story there. I think people like these curated, customized experiences a little bit more than the hard brands you know, the onset of soft brands, right, though?

Glenn: Totally. All right. So let me get a little bit more nuanced. Right. Do you think that there’s a difference between the upper end of the market when it comes to the focus on independent hotels versus more traditional midscale type property?

Tom: I think I’m on the upper scale. Yeah. Go upper upscale or luxury? That independent space is phenomenal. You know, double digit red bar indexes, guest service scores are higher. Mid scale I think is more about point gathering.

Glenn: Just exactly what I’m thinking right now. And the thoughts were just coming to my mind. I’m like, don’t interrupt him. Don’t interrupt him. And then you said it. But yeah, I think that makes perfect sense, because when you’re in the luxury end of the market, you don’t necessarily need to seek the points because you have the financial resources to be able to travel where you want. For goodness sake, you’re at a luxury hotel, right? That’s right. So it’s a different mindset and approach, and you have to approach those different customers in different ways. I think that says.

Tom: The only way that we can talk to the customer is to give them an experience they’re looking for and customize it. Sometimes the brands can enhance that. At the upper upscale or luxury, there is a redemption market on the right. And on the positive side, someone who has traveled for business all year collected a bunch of points. I know now does this one major trip and cashes in on that.

Glenn: So like that high end hotel in Hawaii, there’s one paid customer everyone else does twice, right? Yeah. Right. Right. Yeah. Fascinating. So what are you thinking about now with that understanding about how you can get closer to customers?

Tom: Yeah. So coral tree we’ve been growing our platform. We’re now seven years. We’ve got 46, 47 hotels now. We just turned one over last night in Jackson Hole. So ours is all about creating custom experiences and unique destinations. We’re really more in destinations than we are in urban centric markets.

Glenn: Yeah, I’m in Jackson.

Tom: Hole, Jackson Hole. We just did one in Stowe, Vermont two weeks ago. We’ve got one in Yosemite. We just did a major hotel seaport up in Boston on the on the fort. So each of those places are unique. Customer wants to go to the destination, and then they want an experience at the lodging hospitality side that augments it. That’s what we’re doing. So we’re just going to keep finding those markets. But we know we’ve been doing this for a long time, 52 years when we started destination two Roads and now Coral Tree. So we just believe that that’s an insulated market. Even the international travel that’s down when it comes back, they still want to go to these unique destinations that are rich with the natural resources.

Glenn: Absolutely. I mean, that’s what it’s all about. People want to have bragging rights. They want access to things. It’s just going to the same old, same old where everybody goes, that’s kind of out. You want to go somewhere special, something different, somewhere that’s going to tell great stories. Thank you so much for being here today. Appreciate it. Thank you guys for watching all the way to the end. I’m so proud of you. Now I got homework for you. Like share, subscribe. See you later. Bye.