5 minutes with Remington’s Sloan Dean

LOS ANGELES – Always quotable Remington Hospitality CEO Sloan Dean thinks top line revenue will outperform expectations in 2025, again led by strong group business.

In a sit down at ALIS last month, he told Hotel Investment Today that business transient business is still recovering against 2019 highs and there very well could be some permanent changes in that space.

“The small- to mid-sized companies are traveling more than they ever have, but the Fortune 500 are traveling less” he said. “The consultant business is forever changed. Deloitte used to be the number one room night producer for Hilton. It will never be that again… We’re seeing compression on Tuesday and Wednesday, and shorter lengths of stay. The typical consultant coming in Monday morning and staying till Friday is not the norm anymore.”

The small- to mid-sized companies are traveling more than they ever have, but the Fortune 500 are traveling less. The consultant business is forever changed. Deloitte used to be the number one room night producer for Hilton. It will never be that again.

Sloan Dean

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Here are some rapid-fire responses to questions posed to Dean, whose company is based in Dallas.

Hotel Investment Today (HIT): What is your broader take on the strength of U.S. consumer spending?

Sloan Dean: We manage mostly upscale, upper upscale and luxury hotels. Frankly, those guests are not as impacted by inflation. They’ve benefit from inflation. They own stocks. They have investments. So, I think the American consumer is resilient.

I would like to see the dollar weaken so foreign inbound comes back and more U.S. consumers stay home to travel. But I just don’t see that happening. I think we’re going to continue to be a big exporter of travel.

HIT: What do you make of all the third-party management consolidation?

Dean: I think that continues. There’s a lot of private equity that sees it as a continuous opportunity. I think the difference is that people will be a little more conscientious about doing it through too much leverage… We occasionally look at bolt on M&A opportunities… You’ll see multiple transactions in ’25 – who, what and when I don’t know.

HIT: Talk about Remington growth.

Dean: We’re growing the most in CALA because the number one place that U.S. travelers go is Europe, and the second is the Caribbean. Costa Rica grew RevPAR over 20% last year – the highest of any country in North and Central America. Our highest growth is in the Caribbean and Central America, and we’ll probably grow 100% off a small basis. We have eight hotels, and we probably double that this year in the Caribbean, Central America – call it from Puerto Rico over to Costa Rica.

Secondly, organic growth domestically mostly comes from owners we already do business with. So, your best client is your current client.

Remington just added management of ONE | GT, a 177-unit luxury urban residential hotel scheduled to open in November in Grand Cayman in the Cayman Islands.

HIT: What do you expect to see going forward with your biggest owner, Ashford Hospitality Trust?

Dean: When I took over running Remington in 2018, we had 87 hotels with Ashford Trust and Braemar Hotels & Resorts. Today we have 55. Ashford Trust has had to de-lever. They took corporate mezz from Oaktree in late 2020, and I think they get that paid off this year. They’re going through and continue to de-lever, and the easiest way is to sell assets and pay down debt.

Remington still may face three or four hotels that Ashford Trust wants to sell. Do we retain the contract or not? It’s questionable. But the good news is that the losing of hotels due to asset sales is mostly worked through; the bad is we did lose about 20 hotels over the last 24 to 36 months because our largest affiliate owner was a huge net seller. I think Ashford Hospitality Trust will materially outperform their peer set REITs in 2025 and I would like to see them in the next 12 months flip from a net seller to a net buyer, and we start to pick up a few hotels.

Remington has diversified a lot and we’re now two-thirds and growing just strictly third-party. So, that’s going to be the name for us – continue to grow net units under management through third-party relationships and continue to diversify away from being just seen as an Ashford management partner.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong for a young person to say, ‘I don’t subscribe to working for a company for 35 years, killing myself and not understanding what the corporate strategy is and the why am I doing this.’

Sloan Dean

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HIT: What do you want to accomplish this year as a professional?

Dean: I just want to leave a great legacy in hospitality. I never saw myself as the CEO of a hotel company. I got an engineering and finance degree from Georgia Tech. Who goes and gets an industrial systems engineering degree and says, ‘hey, I’m going to lead a hotel company?’

I am a father of three, soon to be four, and I want my kids when they’re grown to say, ‘dad made a huge difference in people’s lives that work in hotels.’

I want to leave a legacy of Remington being the best place for people to work, meaning we hire or retire, or you come for the job, and you stay for the career. That’s far more important to me than growing 20 hotels a year, hitting my budget and EBITDA target. I hope I never lose sight of that.

HIT: Labor is the biggest issue facing hoteliers. How do we best address it?

Dean: As there are other industries that AI intermediates more than hotels, we can benefit. But we need to inspire the younger generation that hotels are fun and great places to build a career. And I’d like to be part of that.

We launched a program called ‘Up.’ It is career pathing for first time managers and supervisors who aspire to be GMs, and it’s a year-long program. I want to expand that into other roles in the company. We started with an inaugural class, and I think that is both a retention and development tool of young individuals. I’m passionate about the next generation and I’d like to spend the next 10 years developing career pathing development programs to inspire them to be the next generation of leaders.

A lot of the older leaders sometimes say millennials and Gen Z are lazy or they’re entitled… I always say, ‘well, who are their parents?’ It’s the people that are complaining about them.

The younger generation is a little different in that they always want to know the why. They also want to be inspired. Work-life balance is a little more important to them. Owning things is less important to them. So, how do we, as businesses, inspire millennials and Gen Z to come work in hotels, build careers, and not have this false pretense that they’re entitled and lazy?

I don’t think there’s anything wrong for a young person to say, ‘I don’t subscribe to working for a company for 35 years, killing myself and not understanding what the corporate strategy is and the why am I doing this.’

We just need to do a better job with the next generation, and I see it as a huge opportunity for hoteliers to inspire those 20- and 30-year-olds to spend the next 30 to 40 years making this a great industry.