Coury Hospitality’s formula for opportunistic boutique growth

DALLAS – In the rapidly changing hotel management business, there are fewer boutique specialists, and that is the niche where Dallas-based owner-operator Coury Hospitality stakes its claim and plans to grow.

CEO and Founder Paul Coury boasts a portfolio of 14 hotel properties and some 27 bar and restaurant concepts that he insists are the key to driving top line revenue and eventually bottom lines for hotel owners. He calls F&B success his revenue management strategy and said it was instrumental in a 13% increase in top line revenue last year.

“We are definitely food and beverage forward. That’s what drives the success of the hotels, what brings people back, what brings the community to come eat and drink with you,” said Coury, who founded the company in 1999 and known for historic renovations. “In the food and beverage world, the trick is gross sales, and the way I fix my margins, the way I fix everything, is by driving that revenue.”

His strategy is working as he told Hotel Investment Today that Coury Hospitality, also a soft brand specialist, has six of the top 10 Autograph Collection by Marriott hotels on the intent to recommend list [nine in the top 20], which is the gold standard metric for Marriott performance. “Every one of those hotels, with one exception, is number one in RevPAR amongst its comp set,” Coury boasted. “The one exception is downtown Oklahoma City, where we manage three hotels [two Autographs and one Curio by Hilton] and we are one, two and three there.”

Wine cave at Hotel Vin in Grapevine, Texas

Looking ahead in the near term, Coury will expand its Texas footprint with the fall 2024 opening of the HALL Group’s 224-room HALL Park Hotel, the first Autograph Collection lifestyle hotel in Frisco. Coury is also expanding its Vin Hotel Collection brand with Hotel Vin Rogers,  anticipated to open in Rogers, Arkansas, early in 2026.

NewcrestImage deal

What makes Coury Hospitality even more newsworthy today is its recent deal with Grapevine, Texas-based NewcrestImage, which took a 50% stake in Coury to help strategically expand the portfolio. Coury said he expects his company to grow to 25 assets inside three years.

Currently, Coury owns about half of the hotels in the company portfolio and the rest are third-party management deals. With the NewcrestImage deal, he said he is looking for a platform to expand his investment capital as much as anything else. “I really didn’t need it to expand the management side. However, it’s been very conducive to have NewcrestImage because they have a whole other network. Also, they like lifestyle and wanted to be exposed to it.”

Coury said the duo already has three conversion deals, adding, “we’re going be a good yin and yang for what we do with the growth of the operating company.”

He expects to manage most of what NewcrestImage develops on the lifestyle side, while Aimbridge will continue to manage NewcrestImage’s limited-service growth.

At the moment, Coury has another six Autograph Collections and one Tribute by Marriott property in the pipeline. He also has a couple other deals in the works to take over operations without developing.

In fact, Coury added that his company is one of eight approved to manage luxury hotels with Marriott. It is working on a couple Luxury Collection deals where it will manage and invest, and one co-invested JW Marriott deal with NewcrestImage.

People that spend money in the lifestyle space have more discretionary income and the old elasticity of demand theory has been pushed to the brink and keeps going up.

Paul Coury

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More opportunistically, Coury said he is talking to NewcrestImage CEO Mehul Patel about developing a new F&B-driven hotel investment platform with the potential for three or four properties in the right demand-driven locations in markets like Dallas and Houston, or in Arizona or Florida, that have big surrounding demand generators. The properties could have six restaurant concepts in various shapes and sizes, as well as musical entertainment to attract the locals. He is already having success with a similar concept at Coury’s 125-room Hotel Vin, Autograph Collection in Grapevine, Texas, that is expected to generate a staggering $14.5 million in F&B this year.

“It takes three acres to you make it work. So, it’s limiting on where you can do it,” Coury said. “But again, I think my strategy as a company is to continue to evolve with leading design and things that are more unique.”

He added that Patel is definitely looking at deals, “and trust me, he finds them. So, by default, we’ll be doing some of that.”

In a recent interview with Hotel Investment Today, Patel added, “Coury also gets a lot of new deals where developers need help with capital or development expertise, and we can provide that expertise. So, it allows us to grow with Coury, as well.”

Patel also called Coury the master of F&B execution. “So, every time we have F&B, we rely on Coury teams to execute for us,” he added.

Pay it forward

When asked about growth challenges, Coury said his company is focused on labor retention and launched successful bonus packages only for line level employees. One is based on how the property scores against its comp set and the other is based on overall budget results.

“When you talk about things that are atypical or make a difference in someone’s life, I can tell you I’ve seen it now with this program, and it works,” Coury said. “People will stay another year, or they may give me a mulligan over something they’re unhappy about because overall they feel like we do care about them.”

Bigger picture, Coury expects hotels to have a pretty good year. “Lifestyle still looks pretty promising, while some of limited-service is going to experience challenges,” he said. “People that spend money in the lifestyle space have more discretionary income and the old elasticity of demand theory has been pushed to the brink and keeps going up. People just aren’t pushing back. After COVID, it’s like they just changed their mindset.”