How leading with F&B translates to ROI for Coury Hospitality

GRAPEVINE, Texas — Lifestyle is a term used in many different ways in the hotel industry, Andrew Casperson admits. However, the newly promoted president of Grapevine-based Coury Hospitality has a very specific idea of what it means for his company.

“When I think of what we do and what makes us different, one of the things that we say is we lead with food and beverage. Oh and, by the way, we have rooms,” he said.

That doesn’t mean room revenue isn’t a massive contributor to Coury’s success and how it manages its lifestyle hotel portfolio, but it also allows the company to focus on other details.

“When you lead with food and beverage, you pay attention to those details and you pay attention to making sure that people have a great experience every day. Not once a month. Not once a quarter… but to do it every day. That’s when you start making a difference.”

Coury Hospitality announced the promotion of Casperson last week. For the past year as COO, he’s led operations strategies for the portfolio of hotels, bars and restaurant concepts. He will also lead Concert Hospitality, which Coury launched last July to manage hotels in the full- and limited-service sectors.

Casperson first came to the Dallas area as a general manager for W Hotels Victory Plaza in downtown Dallas. He’s worked for Omni Hotels & Resorts and picked up management experience at Highgate and Aimbridge Hospitality before coming to Coury as executive vice president. That experience has been essential, he said, in managing Coury and Concert’s current portfolio.

Creating Concert was something that we probably needed to do a long time ago. Now we have created a platform that we can work with our existing owners and run some of their other assets for them.

Andrew Casperson

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“We spend a lot of time making sure that we consistently execute on a high level, not just by chance or because we’re having a good day,” he said. “That makes a difference and it’s not just in our restaurants or in our lobby bars. We bring that through banquets. We bring that through the pool areas. We bring that through banquets and catering because, quite frankly, those are things that make memories.”

Company growth

The company’s portfolio has grown quite a bit in the last few years, from 11 properties in 2023 to 23 today (including nine hotels where Coury owns all or part of the property). Casperson said the portfolio number could be in the high 30s in the coming years (counting the six properties currently in the Concert portfolio, which is also rapidly growing.)

The first six hotels in the Concert portfolio are owned by Grapevine-based NewcrestImage, which is a 50% owner of Coury Hospitality. But Casperson said the portfolio will rapidly expand to other owners as well because the need exists for properties other than the lifestyle hotels in Coury’s portfolio.

“Creating Concert was something that we probably needed to do a long time ago,” he said. “Now we have created a platform that we can work with our existing owners and run some of their other assets for them, and over the last six months to a year, we’ve been getting a lot more phone calls.”

The next hotels coming into the Concert portfolio are with owners the company already has existing relationships with through Coury, Casperson said.

“They’re extremely pleased with the way we’re executing [at Coury], whether it be on the revenue side, the service side or their profitability side of their core asset and now they’re saying, if you can do that there, I can only imagine what you can do on the Concert side,” he said. “If we can take a little bit of that Coury ‘special sauce,’ if you will, and infuse that on the Concert side, that’s something that space hasn’t seen yet, and that’s what excites us.”

Coury Hospitality partnered with the city of Grapevine to develop, manage and operate the Hotel Vin in Grapevine, Texas.

Casperson said he and CEO Paul Coury spend a lot of time talking about growth strategy. “We don’t have a number. It’s not 500 hotels, but it’s strategically growing. But what we are being extremely cautious of is setting our teams up for success,” he said. “[We’re] actually almost doubling each year. It’s probably going to slow down over time. I don’t know that there is an exact end in sight, but it’s not a race to be the biggest by any stretch.”

When asked about hotel growth in occupancy, ADR and RevPAR, Casperson said he thinks the company’s hotels will land higher than the industry projections of 1.5-2.5% for RevPAR and said the company is keeping a close eye on leisure travel.

“We love the growth we’ve seen in leisure travel over the years, and we hope it stays,” he said. “Some people think it might slow down, but we still believe that if we create the right experience, we’ll still see leisure travelers. We’re still bullish on that. We are spending a lot of time with that transient customer.”

Digging into F&B

When asked about what makes an attractive asset to add, Casperson noted a property that Coury partnered with the city of Grapevine to develop, manage and operate the 120-key Hotel Vin in Grapevine and its adjacent food hall, Harvest Hall.

“It’s a hotel that we’re very proud of… Some months it actually does more revenue from food and beverage than it does in rooms,” he said.

We love it when we walk into a hotel and 70% to 80% of the people are from the local market. We still want to have room for our hotel customers, but we know we hit the nail on the head when the bar or restaurant is full of people from the local market.

Andrew Casperson

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Casperson said it’s a great example of how F&B brings the company a lot of flexibility and ROI.

“When we’re looking at specific lifestyle hotels, we love having multiple outlets,” he said. “To us, that makes it fun, but it also helps us drive revenues and create experiences, which really helps us not only on the corporate and midweek side but on the leisure and on the weekend side as well.”

Casperson said a big part of the company’s F&B strategy is to create “resident experts” and to drive more than half of the revenue from the community compared to hotel guests.

“We want to create restaurants and bar experiences that the people from the local market [use],” he said. “We love it when we walk into a hotel and 70% to 80% of the people are from the local market. We still want to have room for our hotel customers, but we know we hit the nail on the head when the bar or restaurant is full of people from the local market. We don’t want to just rely on the hotel capture, and we do that by really spending a lot of time looking at what the market needs.”

That means having restaurants inside hotels that have a free-standing feel (that can mean having a separate entrance but can also mean creating a welcoming environment in the lobby entrance for non-guests). Casperson said the company is striving for a 60-40 split in revenue from the local market compared to hotel guests.

“We know, inevitably, breakfast is going to have a big in-house capture. So, that skews it a little bit. But when you’re getting some solid travel in for lunchtime… or dinner, you can get a lot of people from local whether they’re coming in through different channels,” he said. “That’s when we know we’re really doing well.”

That F&B emphasis can also translate to hotels in the Concert portfolio as well.

“We love our brand partners, but if we had a little bit more entertainment, or maybe we spent a little bit more time on how we execute on the F&B side, can we create more memories and make it so people want to come back?” he said. “Some [owners or brands] will choose to do nothing but that’s not really our DNA. We like pushing it a little bit and we believe we can continue to evolve the Concert space as well.”