🏨 Coast Hotels Expansion & Market Insights at ALIS 2025

Speaker1: Hey, everybody. It’s your hospitality. Friend Glenn here at Alice. And I’m with Mark Hoek of Coast Hotels. But first I want to thank our sponsors over at In Focus. You know, focus is technology that drives value. Please check them out at focus.com. Mark, you are thinking about expansion plans. You’re on the West Coast doing all of that stuff. What are you thinking? Why West coast? It seems like a lot of people are tired of the West Coast and stuff like that, but you’re going all in.

Speaker2: We’re based in Vancouver, B.C., Canada. I’ve got 35 hotels in Canada and ten in the US. And, you know, it’s easier to expand on the US West Coast than it is to expand across Canada to the other side.

Speaker1: Right. So what we’re really talking about is being in the same region. So your personnel could be able to get in there.

Speaker2: Yeah. We’ve we bought our first US asset that we owned last year. We bought a 256 room in downtown Seattle. Right now we’re looking at Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland. Because the whole thing is it’s hub and spoke. It’s all the hubs are down the West coast, the spokes being, you know what? We lay around with their franchises. Yep.

Speaker1: That makes makes a whole lot of sense. But set against the economic backdrop, how are you thinking about going ahead and doing this? Because that’s what we’re talking about here at Alice.

Speaker2: The biggest economic backdrop right now is the Canadian dollar is not worth a whole lot. And our parent company’s company is Japanese, and the Japanese yen is also not worth a whole lot.

Speaker1: As far as I’d say, the fact that the Canadian dollar is not worth a lot is pretty loonie to me. Ha ha.

Speaker2: Okay, sorry. You can all have fun. No you know, it’s economically I mean, again, there’s more people in hotels in California than there is all Canada, right? You know again, we believe there’s synergy to have hotels in the major primary cities. And it’s how our network works. Yeah.

Speaker1: So what are you thinking about overall? The the possibility of the hotel industry to keep moving forward, increasing rates and be able to get more profitability in a market where people are feeling pinched.

Speaker2: Rates the big thing, right? Because in a lot of cases, you can’t move occupancy any further, especially with supply continues to climb. So you have to move right. But you look at everybody. What’s the cost of protein at the at the grocery store this year? All your operating costs as an individual or as a company have gone up. So therefore they should relatively pay more on rate, which is what we have to get.

Speaker1: Awesome. Thank you. Mark. It’s really great talking with you today. Hey he’s Mark. I’m still Glen Housman. Thanks for tuning in. We got a lot of coverage here at Alice either before this video and after this video. I don’t know, but it’s a lot. See you guys later. And don’t forget you to focus, you know? Focus.