After a few rebuilding years, Aimbridge Hospitality's CEO said he expects the third-party hotel management company is ready to take on the opportunities before it.
Recent hotel forecasts have projected flat hotel performance based on past years, but 2026 should be a bit better, Aimbridge President and CEO Craig Smith said in an interview. It will be tough for U.S. hoteliers as there are still challenges from inflation and wage increases, even as those pressures ease.
The pandemic and recovery led to a lot of people changing jobs, putting greater pressure on wage growth, Smith said. Things have settled generally, and workers are coming back to the hotel industry. Wage inflation may still outstrip revenue-per-available-room growth, but it won't be by as much. It remains to be seen, however, the full effects that tariffs will have on goods and services.
"Basically, it's really going to be a year that we have to figure out how to drive more bottom line to our owners," he said.
If Aimbridge can grow share, then it's growing RevPAR for hotel owners, Smith said. The company has doubled down, adding more jobs above the property level and having big sales teams focused on different sources of hotel demand.
"So, rather than roll over and say, 'Hey, it's a bad top-line year,' we're saying, 'Well, we think we can steal share, and we think that we have the ability to now drive a little bit more to the bottom line for our teams,'" he said.
A new start
At the beginning of 2025, Plano, Texas-based Aimbridge saw its ownership change through a debt-structuring deal, relieving the company of some financial weights on its back. When the deal was finalized, Aimbridge went from having a “very unhealthy” balance sheet to one of the strongest in the industry, Smith said.
“That’s really given us an opportunity to not only invest outward, but it’s interesting — our investors, our owners, are making sure that we’re investing in ourselves, so there’s a lot of internal investment,” he said.
At the same time, Aimbridge was gaining ground with hotel owners, moving out of what Smith deemed as the “penalty box” at the time. Ownership satisfaction is not measured just the level of complaint but by also by whether those owners want to bring more hotels under Aimbridge's management.
“That’s how I judge it, and it’s nice to see that most of them are calling us and offering us hotels,” he said. “We’ve got calls from outside. We’ve got a lot of phone calls lately for new hotel deals, and we’re at a point where we’re starting to turn some things down that really aren’t accretive to us.”
Aimbridge also has an entirely new board of directors: six board members including Smith and its chairman, Steve Joyce. Every member of the Aimbridge board has hospitality experience, so they know the right questions to ask and directions to push, Smith said. Some board members are leaning into the company’s growth. Others are deep in the accounting side of the business, further helping the company’s health.
Within the executive leadership team, Aimbridge has had some wins over the last year through promotions and new hires, Smith said. Allison Handy has been promoted three times over the last two years to be the chief commercial officer, leading the company’s sales, marketing, revenue management and brand efforts. These were previously siloed functions that are now working together, and Smith said its enjoyable to sit in on meetings and hear how all the teams are working together and strategizing.
Aimbridge’s select-service division holds the majority of its hotels, Smith said. The company hired Chris O’Donnell from Atrium Hospitality to be president of this division.
His counterpart over the full-service division is Chris Tatum, who joined Aimbridge in August 2024 after leading a portfolio of hotels for Davidson Hospitality.
Over the past year or so, Aimbridge has had more time to work on its performance management culture, Smith said. There’s more meritocracy, and it has promoted people who are performing well. It conducts monthly performance reviews at every level. Smith and his executive leadership team meet with their respective teams, and they in turn do the same down through their organizations to see how they’re doing, what they can do better and find where they can lean in.
Taking this approach helps identify the people who can actually drive hotel performance because measuring results every month shows who can move the needle, Smith said. When he first came to Aimbridge, Smith talked with people he calls historians, who could explain everything that happened in the past month. It was great to start because they knew their numbers, but they couldn’t necessarily change the future, he said.
“[They’re] really good at telling you why you didn't make the numbers or why you didn't perform, but the real leadership is, can you change and move the needle going forward?” he said. “And so, some of those folks have really come up in organization.”
Reinvestment
As part of Aimbridge’s balance sheet restructuring, the company received $100 million in new capital. That allowed the company to reinvest in its ratios, lowering the number of hotels per regional vice president, Smith said. Aimbridge has done the same on the commercial side as well.
“We want to be a team that the revenue leader, sales leader and an [operations] leader all have the same portfolio of hotels,” he said.
Aimbridge has also reinvested into data analytics, Smith said. The business analytics team is doing well, and while they’re already doing a lot of work, the company will invest more into machine-learning and artificial intelligence. The marketing and digital team has added strong talent as well.
Aimbridge’s board of directors and investors want further investment in AI, Smith said. Currently, the leadership team is sitting in the space figuring out the best area to pursue.
“Because we don’t want to invest in AI in the areas the brands are, the [online travel agencies] are,” he said. “We want to be complementary, and so we’re looking at labor productivity models, forecasting.”
Aimbridge has already invested some in this area, and it’s planning to spend more because better forecasting can lead to achieving better rates and revenue per available room, he said. That can also mean better scheduling and better sales on the bottom line.
“I think in this industry, this time period has been really hard to forecast because there’s so much going on, but if you can react faster and better than your competitors, that puts you much farther ahead,” he said.
Working with owners
Aimbridge’s hotel owners are saying they feel like the teams are focused on them, Smith said. The teams are back under ownership groups instead of split up geographically. Third-party hotel management is not a business-to-consumer business; instead, it’s business-to-business.
“Those owners really wanted one or two touchpoints,” he said. “They wanted one or two [regional vice presidents] that are receiving their portfolios. They didn’t want to talk to 12 different people because they have hotels in 12 different states.”
The restructuring made the owners happier as they had an easier time talking to the right people at Aimbridge, Smith said. They also saw hotel performance improve over the past year. The hotel industry overall has seen muted RevPAR growth, but Aimbridge was able to deliver more for its owners than its competitors.
“We have a lot of focus on that top line, that commercial side,” he said. “I know that's one of our biggest key competitive strengths. And I think owners are seeing that, the above-property teams that we have going forward, and so there's a lot of positive talk about what they're seeing.”
The meetings Smith said he had with hotel owners at the NYU International Hospitality Investment Forum two years ago were “pretty rough.” By comparison, the meetings now still include feedback about what could be better, but overall Aimbridge is receiving positive feedback about its teams and leadership.
The third-party management space will see further consolidation through companies buying each other or merging with one another, Smith said, adding that Aimbridge's scale will be an advantage in the future. The good and bad thing about the third-party hotel operations space is the barriers to entry are low.
“You got a cell phone, you have a car and, if you worked in a hotel, you can start up an operating company,” he said. “Really, the barriers are very low, and that’s probably one of the reasons that we see that the business is so fragmented.”
Given Aimbridge’s size, it’s about two to three times as big as the next hotel management company, and the other bigger companies are double the size of their next competitor, he said. At the same time, Aimbridge’s portfolio is roughly 1,000 hotels, but Marriott International is nearly 10,000 hotels while Hilton has about 9,000.
“As big as we are, we don't even have 1% of the industry,” he said. “I think you're going to see consolidation going forward, because I think there's some advantages with cost and with AI and tools that owners will see that that are relevant.”
Smith said some of Aimbridge's hotel owners have shared concerns that as soon as a company gets big, it doesn’t do well, but his goal is to prove them wrong. Some companies get big and full of themselves, forgetting they win one hotel at a time. But setting up a system that measures every hotel individually and in groups means Aimbridge is concentrating on who is winning and who’s not and the reasons why.
If a company grows just to get big and pat itself on the back, no one cares that it’s big, he said. Owners care about their hotels. They only want to work with a bigger company because it can deliver things at a cheaper cost, freeing them to invest more money in the tools they need.
“I think that's what the industry hasn't done, it hasn't reinvested to those benefits,” he said. “And so, as you get large, are you really giving those benefits of scales to your owner, or are you taking internally for yourself as a company?”
These are internal conversations at Aimbridge, he said. If it renegotiates a contract, it could take the benefits itself, but the point is to give it back to the owner. When an owner joins with Aimbridge, it can show it has better purchasing prices and less expensive information technology, human resources and benefit costs. On top of that, it can show it has money to invest in tools that can improve forecasting, leading to better scheduling and labor costs.
Growth prospects
As Aimbridge looks ahead, all-inclusive resorts are a big deal for Smith. Most of them are big-box hotels with a lot of guestrooms, generate great fees and have longer-term contracts.
“I think nobody really dominates in this space,” he said.
Leadership of this property type requires understanding how they work, he said. Putting someone in charge of an all-inclusive resort who only has select-service or urban hotels experience isn’t going to work. While some of the leadership team had experience with all-inclusive resorts, Aimbridge bolstered its all-inclusive skill set with some new hires, including a sales leader and a new vice president of operations and an upcoming hire yet to be announced.
Aimbridge is looking at both coasts of Mexico and the Caribbean for all-inclusive management opportunities, he said. The company also recently opened an all-inclusive resort in Port Lucie, Florida.
The popularity of all-inclusive resorts continues to grow because guests like the concept of making one payment to cover everything, especially as many are traveling with multiple generations of family, he said.
“You don't have to worry about somebody having an extra thing of fries or taking something out of the mini bar,” he said.
As the third-party management model gains ground internationally, Aimbridge is seeing opportunities open up in multiple countries. Europe, where Aimbridge already has a presence, has paths for growth in the United Kingdom as well as in Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, Smith said. The company is also receiving a lot of calls about hotels in southern Europe.
Aimbridge is looking at the Asia market, but it might be too early, he said.
“I don’t want to stretch my team too thin, going too many directions at one time,” he said. “The United States is still our top priority. It’s such a huge market, there’s so much opportunity here. I think it’ll probably be the biggest growth in the short term.”
So, while the calls out of Asia and the Middle East are excited, Aimbridge wants to make sure it can have sustainable success, Smith said. When talking with owners in other countries, Aimbridge executives explain they need a minimum number of hotels in the area to justify having an office there to service them well. It won’t work to have four hotels spread across four Asian countries overseen by someone who has to fly out from the West Coast of the U.S.
“You need somebody in that market, and I learned having lived over there and also in other parts of the world that nothing beats local knowledge,” he said. “So, having an office where people wake up every day and read the local newspaper and know what's going on makes a big difference.”
Over the past few years, Aimbridge has pushed its teams to recognize hotel brand companies as a fourth stakeholder alongside its owner, hotel owners and Aimbridge associates, Smith said. That wasn’t the mindset before, and the relationship reflected that. After this shift, Aimbridge has been asking for performance reviews, and the brands are seeing guest satisfaction scores “have shot through the roof,” Smith said.
This had led to brands recommending Aimbridge to hotel owners, particularly in areas that are still new to the third-party management model, he said. The teams are now working with hotel owners in different regions, explaining that while they will pay two fees, they’re still going to make more money on the bottom line.
It can be confusing to hotel owners who haven’t done this before, so it helps having people in these markets who have experience with the model, he said.
“When you’ve got leaders that go into a market that have worked and know people and are trusted, this is a trust business,” he said. “I think it makes it a lot easier, and that’s helped us to get a foothold.”
With all of these potential paths to further growth, Aimbridge’s teams are also being careful about growing too much, too fast, Smith said.
“We need to be disciplined in our growth,” he said. “I think you can grow to death. …You need to make sure that you don't sit in front of a buffet line and eat more than you can digest.”