PHOENIX — The magic word across the hotel operations space for the last few years has been scale as various hotel management companies look toward mergers and acquisitions to better position themselves going forward.
But that's not the plan of attack for Twenty Four Seven Hotels, said Amanda Hawkins-Vogel, executive vice president of operations and guest service at the Newport Beach, California-based company.
"We're all good," she said, while speaking to Hotel News Now during the 2022 Lodging Conference. "We're very comfortable in our own skin and happy with our own growth. That kind of speaks to the leadership at Twenty Four Seven and being very mindful and thoughtful of everything."
With the addition of four hotels in its home state in late September, Twenty Four Seven Hotels' portfolio grew to 25 hotels with roughly 3,200 rooms across four states.
Hawkins-Vogel said she firmly believes that bigger is not necessarily better, and she enjoys working at a company small enough where she can get to know everyone working on property.
"We don't want 100 hotels. We want to be able to be well-focused in our markets, know our investors, know our teams," she said. "We're very happy."
She said the ideal size for the company would be closer to "50 to 60, maximum."
"We feel good about that," Hawkins-Vogel said. "I can absorb another 10 right now with the resources I've got. And we don't need them this week. I don't need them this year. I think [growth should be] slow and steady. It's much better to be very mindful."
She said Twenty Four Seven Hotels is also very thoughtful about where it grows geographically, focusing on the western portion of the U.S., stretching from Denver to the West Coast.
"We know [those markets]. We live in the market. Our people are right there, so that's a good differentiator," she said.
Twenty of the company's properties are now in California. Its four newest additions are the 128-room Hyatt House Sacramento/Midtown, the 112-room Hyatt Place Newark/Silicon Valley, the 90-room Hampton Inn & Suites Marina and the 119-room Holiday Inn Express Chino Hills, which are all slated to open in December.
She said the type of bolt-on acquisitions other third-party managers are doing right now are "just not our DNA."
"It's just not something that we would think about doing," Hawkins-Vogel said. "I think you have to know who you want to be."
And who Twenty Four Seven wants to be is a company that's aligned from top to bottom.
"We don't ever want to be so big that we don't know who's working in the kitchen," she said. "I'm the least important person in the equation, and I tell that to [staff at] the hotels. It's about the people that are cleaning the rooms and the lovely front-desk agents standing there. And that warms my heart because I started at the front desk."
From a performance standpoint, Hawkins-Vogel said the biggest thing her company and the overall hotel industry needs right now is for business travel to come back en masse, and a boost in international travel would help, as well.
"Once we get [international] airlift fixed, I think we'll really feel like COVID is in the rear-view mirror for us," she said.