Aimbridge Hospitality names 'operator at heart' Smith as CEO

PLANO, Texas – Third-party management giant Aimbridge Hospitality thinks it has the most important piece of the puzzle to help overcome recent challenges brought on by lightning-fast growth and COVID – a new CEO in highly experienced hotelier, an operator at heart, Craig Smith.

Smith, a long-time Marriott executive who eventually led their international business, will join Aimbridge on March 18, solidifying leadership after former CEO Mike Deitemeyer stepped down last November. He is expected to design and accelerate plans at Aimbridge Hospitality that put the hotel GM at the center, drive greater value at scale and further enhance the company’s culture.

The company also announced changes to its Board of Managers to support Smith with additional CEO-level hospitality experience. Effective immediately, Steve Joyce, who joined the Aimbridge board in November 2023, will step up to assume the role of executive chairman. He is expected to work closely with Smith and the company’s senior management team to advance strategic plans, including finalizing the previously announced streamlined structure in the U.S. and broaden the company’s global footprint.

Love the people that work for you. It’s really about getting out and talking to people and asking questions… People will tell you what needs to be done.

Craig Smith

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Smith said Aimbridge will put even greater emphasis on strengthening operations and simplifying their approach to be built around the general manager, activating operational efficiencies that leverage their scale and create material value for the organization and the owners they support.

He told Hotel Investment Today that job number one is continuing to focus on lifting the operation and making sure owners are happy. “There’s a huge opportunity in this area right now [both domestically and internationally] and we want to capture as much as we can and continue to be the predominant player in this industry,” Smith said.

To address internal challenges and opportunities, Smith put it simply: “love the people that work for you. It’s really about getting out and talking to people and asking questions… People will tell you what needs to be done.”

That goes back, he said, to giving GMs even more control of their assets. “As companies grows, it can become more confusing as to who’s making decisions, and where,” he said. “If you put the right people in the job, they know what to do. They know how to run a hotel, and our job then becomes at the corporate headquarters is to spend more time supporting them… Our job is to make them successful versus them working for us.”

Smith began his career in operations before moving to an executive role with Marriott, where he rose to run the entire international business prior to his retirement from the brand. He oversaw more than 2,500 hotels worldwide – two-thirds of which were brand-managed — across 28 brands and led a workforce of more than 230,000 hotel and regional support center associates. He had direct responsibility for operations, development, brand acquisitions, sales and marketing, legal, and human resources across the entire international business.

He retired almost a year ago to the date and was even talking with some contemporaries about starting a third-party business because of the recognized growth opportunity. But Aimbridge called and he couldn’t resist the opportunity.

“I’m an operator at heart and someone said to me when I walk into a hotel my whole face lights up,” he said. “I like walking the back of the house, meeting with the team, trying to motivate them and watch them grow. This is an operator’s job.”

In the end, Smith said if the GMs and owners are happy, the opportunity to grow is “phenomenal.”

“The first goal is probably associated with the word ‘trust,’ gaining the trust of the people that work for us, but also of our owners,” he added. “Then they want to come back to us.”

Structure in place

Joyce told Hotel Investment Today that the organizational structure change that’s going to be really critical is done and bringing in Smith gives them a world-class operator, “and that’s by anybody’s measure.”

He pointed to Smith’s diverse background, having worked the various jobs up to GM, as a turnaround specialist, and having done all of this in different international environments. “He is the right guy at the right time to take us to that next level of operational excellence that we need to get to,” Joyce said.

Joyce believes Aimbridge has worked through a lot of its missteps and Smith comes in with a clean slate to accelerate growth and become the most effective third-party manager with a great emphasis on owner relations, which he admits may have slipped during COVID. While retention rate remains in the 90s, according to Joyce, he said the next step is to build on that. “We should be the preferred operator for most owners and for the brands. This goes a long way to doing that.”

With a couple of nuanced things we’ve done, and the new leadership, this thing can be really interesting. I’ve had some pretty good runs, and this could be a pretty fun run.

Steve Joyce

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Joyce added that these moves should lead to better performance, better relations and a much more positive growth story in a relatively short amount of time.

The rest of the team

Joyce succeeds Glenn Murphy who has served as chairman since 2019 and will remain on the board.

Joining Joyce and Murphy on the board is long-time industry veteran Michael Barnello, managing partner and founder of Badlands Hotel Capital and the former president and CEO of LaSalle Hotel Properties.

Joyce said Barnello is going to help significantly on the growth side with his dealmaking prowess and making sure that Aimbridge thinks more like an owner. “The combination of Smith and Barnello is very powerful,” he added.

As for his return, Joyce said he missed the hotel business and the long-standing relationships. “Running a restaurant company and running REMAX was not the same as this business and doesn’t have the same talent or characters,” he said. “I grew up in this business. Going to ALIS [in January] was like a family reunion.”

He said he wouldn’t have come back if not for the Aimbridge opportunity. “With a couple of nuanced things we've done, and the new leadership, this thing can be really interesting. I’ve had some pretty good runs, and this could be a pretty fun run. When I talk to the folks here, I tell then to stick around because this could turn out to be something that you'll remember for the rest of your life and be really fun.”

Joyce added that owners tell him the industry needs a big company like Aimbridge because it needs somebody that can take over a chain of hotels, can take a company international, excel at multiple disciplines and has a lot of data to share.

The goal, he said: be the highest-rated owner satisfaction, third-party management company with an incredible growth trajectory, both in the U.S. and internationally.

The longer-term strategy

Looking a few years out when Aimbridge’s owners could be in a better position to transact, Joyce said an IPO will depend on the state of the economy and the market, and that a private transaction might make for an interesting alternative.

“I could easily see this going in a private transaction to somebody who wants to combine it with some other assets they have,” Joyce said. “But we’re focused on what we need to do today and nothing is going to come anytime soon.”

Joyce added that the current owners are patient capital and not in any hurry to transact. “They’ve said several times our goal is to make sure that we leave this asset in better shape than when we bought it,” he added. “They see a path to where they wanted to get to in the first place, and once we get there, it’s a question of what’s the best liquidity strategy at that point.”