Coury creates complementary management company

DALLAS – Paul Coury thinks he has built a better mousetrap with his pure soft brand and lifestyle management company, Coury Hospitality, and said his numbers back it up with an 8% year-to-date beat on budget. Now he has a plan to do the same thing for the likes of core Marriotts, Hiltons and Hyatts – mostly in the full-service segment and some in select-service – with newly launched Concert Hospitality. It will operate separately from Coury and launches today with four properties primarily owned by his equal partner Mehul Patel, CEO of NewcrestImage, including the Marriott Westlake in Dallas/Fort Worth.

The first four properties are across the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, where parent company Coury Holdings is based, as well as in Los Angeles and Columbus, Ohio. Coury told Hotel Investment Today he expects another five or six deals – mostly in Texas and Oklahoma – to be completed soon (also generated by Patel) and sees Concert Hospitality growing to about 25 hotels under management inside 18 months.

Marriott Westlake in Dallas/Fort Worth will be among the first to join Concert Hospitality

Coury said while his business is up 8%, data suggests typical full- and limited-service hotels are down 7% this year. “The best way to drive your EBITDA is not necessarily to cut your expenses – it’s to manage expenses but grow revenue,” Coury said. “You don’t always get there by just cutting and that’s a lot of the mentality in the limited-service world.”

While Coury said they are not reinventing the management wheel with Concert, they are coming at the business from an approach based on how the world operates differently today. “We see a little different success model through use of human capital and by activation [of the lobby or F&B]… I don’t have to be a lifestyle hotel to give a guest a good, memorable experience with a memorable front desk agent or a little something at turndown… Give them an experience that is a memory, and that doesn’t matter if it’s a boutique or limited-service hotel. It’s just a fresh approach to how we’re going to create the guest experience.”

The Coury way

Concert Hospitality and Coury Hospitality will operate as independent entities with their own dedicated resource teams under parent company Coury Holdings. Concert’s team will be led by newly named industry veteran Chris Charbonnet as regional vice president of operations.

Coury said five management-level hires have been made for Concert but with existing resources he thinks the new management company will be self-supporting from Day One. “The good news is we’re very capable of funding the growth from a working capital standpoint,” Coury said. “We’re hoping that it stays stabilized from the get-go. That’s the model we built.”

Chris Charbonnet

Coury said there will be some crossover synergies in areas like HR, revenue management and training. “We’re able to take about 25% of the things that we can still apply to Concert, but the management of that is different,” he explained. “The regionals are different with different sets of experiences to bring to the table to manage costs differently.”

Coury has also already discovered some creative ways to manage costs through things like property and casualty insurance coverage and health care. “We developed an incredible blanket insurance program, and our property-casualty premiums did not go up this year, whereas most companies went up 20%,” he said. “Those savings flow down. As a result, maybe I can pick up a couple of points on training and bonuses that I pay my employees.”

Those bonuses come from a new platform implemented by Coury after COVID. “The commonality between the two companies is the culture,” Coury said. “We call our employees ‘experience curators’ and have a bonus-based platform that has been incredibly effective. Our employee satisfaction scores are in the 80th percentile. Our people are staying with us.”

Coury said his team is explaining to potential Concert owners about how their model prioritizes staff focusing on guest experience. “It’s going to have to be mutually acceptable for both of us and the owner. I want to make sure that we’re bringing in people who share our philosophy about how we want to treat our people. Owners always tell you that they agree, but they don’t always mean it.”

Bottom line, Coury added, is that owners do see the benefits of what the Coury strategy does for their numbers. “It’s very simple. If my curators are doing what we’re asking them to do and they’re stepping up with servant-type mentalities, our gross revenues are going to go up, and we just have to manage our costs.”

"Coury Hospitality has been an exceptional partner, managing our lifestyle hotels and transforming each property into a vibrant destination in every community,” NewcrestImage’s Patel said. “We’re thrilled for the launch of Concert Hospitality, which will allow us to collaborate even further on our growing portfolio of branded and independent hotels.”