Next-gen Thai owner out to protect family’s independent legacy

BANGKOK – Earp Siriphatrawan is a next-gen hotel owner who is out to protect his family legacy as a small, independent hotel group in Thailand for more than two decades.

Asia is seeing a rising number of younger owners like him, as traditional family businesses pass on the torch to their offspring. Typically, these adult children have been educated overseas, have traveled extensively abroad and are more attuned to global trends than their parents.

Siriphatrawan, owner/director of Amora Hotels & Resorts, has a bachelor’s degree in economics at London School of Economics and Political Science, and a master’s degree in management at London Business School. Before joining the family business during COVID in 2021, he was a consultant with PricewaterhouseCoopers and an investment banker with Siam Commercial Bank.

He speaks confidently about guiding Amora’s transition into a 5-star brand, from 4-star, and his strategy to invest further in Thailand and Australia, and in destinations such as Singapore, Hong Kong and Bali in the longer term.

Growing up, Siriphatrawan watched his father, the late Tanapun Siriphatrawan, who made his fortune in airport duty-free shops, buy their first hotel in Melbourne in 1997, then the Phuket resort in 1999.

The Amora Beach Resort Phuket

Today, the group owns three Amora hotels in Australia, in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, its latest acquisition. It bought the former Novotel Brisbane during the pandemic in 2020 from CDL Hospitality Trusts for around A$76 million ($51 million) and reportedly spent another A$30 million to upgrade the hotel, which will have a grand reopening in February 2024.

Over in Thailand, the group has also completed a 500 million baht ($14 million) renovation of its Amora Beach Resort Phuket. Aside from Phuket, the company owns an Amora hotel in Chiangmai and a boutique property in Bangkok under a sub-brand called Neoluxe.

The six-hotel portfolio comprises a total of 1,350 keys.

In short, it’s an owner/operator that has survived for 26 years on its own. Siriphatrawan believes the group can continue to thrive independently in future, while global chains believe the opposite because COVID-19 opened the eyes of independent owners on the value of being part of their systems.

“Chains do have more distribution, more marketing power and more brand followers. We don’t have their scale or their following of 10 million or 100 million customers, whatever it may be. But what we have is more personalized service,” Siriphatrawan said. “Our staff have been with us since we started and we treat them as family. In turn, they treat our guests as family – they recognize who they are, what their story is and what they like. If you like sparkling water, they will serve you sparkling water when you come back again.”

It’s these little differences that chains can’t get to, Siriphatrawan said, because they don’t keep their people at the same hotel for very long. “In contrast, we have legacy staff who have been with us for 16 to 20 years,” he said. “Our financial controller worked his way up to group financial controller and is now, in his 70s, overseeing our hotels in Australia.”

M&A strategy

Siriphatrawan wants to “bring something to the table” for Amora, especially by leveraging his background in M&A and finance to grow Amora as a leading luxury, modern lifestyle brand in Asia Pacific.

We plan to continue to grow through the same acquire-and-renovate model. We already have some target cities and markets. In Australia, for instance, we want to cover all the key CBD cities, such as Adelaide, Perth and Melbourne, as our existing Melbourne hotel is more on the outskirts of the CBD in an area called Richmond.

Earp Siriphatrawan

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His M&A strategy is the same as his dad’s, which is to acquire then add value to the asset. “It’s passed down through the bloodline,” Siriphatrawan said with a laugh, “but, of course, I try to use the experience I’ve had outside as well.”

Siriphatrawan said Amora always buys freehold. It doesn’t only evaluate the financials and the usual metrics like property value, land value, et cetera, but the fit and synergies the asset can bring. “With the Brisbane property, for example, we expect a return of 7% to 10%, but we also expect the property to have a positive revenue effect on our Sydney hotel, in that domestic travelers in Brisbane would know our brand due to our presence there and stay with us if they are in Sydney. It is hard to measure the value of this synergy.”

Hotels are an attractive asset class, he added. “For us, it’s about leveraging our portfolio and expanding it. And sticking to our expertise as an owner-operator so we don’t have to invest and put in a chain or a brand. This means there are no management fees, no marketing fees, and so on – everything flows down to the margins.”

One key lesson Siriphatrawan took from his role at PwC was realizing an asset’s real value post-deal. “In a deal cycle, there’s the due diligence part, then the valuation part and the transaction part, but what people typically forget is the post-deal integration part, which is important. It’s actually the part where you have to make sure that whatever you buy, you’re able to realize its value.”

Siriphatrawan gave an example of how he added value to the Phuket resort. Demand in Phuket has changed, with markets such as India and the Middle East replacing China, which hasn’t recovered fully, he said. That means the need to create new facilities to ensure the property will appeal to an array of new market segments.

Among the new facilities at the resort are a beach club, which targets not just in-house guests but locals; a kids club to cater to the family market; a beachfront event lawn to attract the weddings market; and a grand ballroom and four meeting rooms to draw more meetings to the resort.

“We plan to continue to grow through the same acquire-and-renovate model,” Siriphatrawan added. “We already have some target cities and markets. In Australia, for instance, we want to cover all the key CBD cities, such as Adelaide, Perth and Melbourne, as our existing Melbourne hotel is more on the outskirts of the CBD in an area called Richmond. We’re just waiting for the right opportunity, the right price and the right fit.”

There aren’t a lot of buyers anymore in the Australian market, which could be an opportunity for Amora, he said. “Rising interest rates have made it a bit difficult for companies that don’t have a lot of cash or equity to go in and buy a hotel. Markets such as Adelaide and Perth aren’t exactly attractive to investors who don’t have hotels in Sydney and Melbourne which they can leverage on,” he observed.

While Australia is a corporate market play, Siriphatrawan believes there’s a need for the group to expand in leisure destinations in Thailand, in the capital city of Bangkok and resort destinations such as Samui and Pattaya.

“Eventually we’ll have to look at key markets such as Singapore and Hong Kong. Vietnam and Bali are a growth opportunity, as well,” he said.