IRVING, Texas—Omni Hotels & Resorts made a significant addition to its portfolio of resorts with its acquisition Wednesday of five iconic resorts from KSL Capital Partners LLC. Terms of the deal were not announced.
Omni plans to reflag the hotels with the Omni brand on 1 July. The portfolio includes 2,362 rooms, 304,000 square feet of meeting space, 12 golf courses, a ski facility and five spas:
- The 312-room Barton Creek Resort & Spa in Austin, Texas, has four golf courses, spa and other facilities.
- The 611-room La Costa Resort and Spa in Carlsbad, California, recently underwent a $50-million renovation. The property has two golf courses and a 43,000-square-foot spa.
- Rancho Las Palmas Resort & Spa in Rancho Mirage, California, has 444 guestrooms, a water park, 27 holes of golf and a 25-court tennis complex.
- The Grove Park Inn in Asheville, North Carolina, has 512 rooms and a golf course. The property is undergoing a $25-million renovation that’s scheduled to be completed this summer. KSL purchased the hotel in April 2012 from an affiliate of Sammons Enterprises.
- Opened in 1766, The Homestead is a 483-room resort in southwestern Virginia. The 2,000-acre property, which is completing a $26-million renovation, has two golf courses, a water park, ski area and equestrian park.
“Omni as a brand has the opportunity to grow very strategically,” Tom Santora, chief marketing officer and senior VP of sales at Omni, told HotelNewsNow.com Wednesday morning. “One benefit we have from an acquisitions perspective is the ability to say no. Where other brands have shareholders and must continue to grow, in our case, we look at every acquisition independently and whether it fits our brand and help grow our brand from a distribution perspective and a positioning perspective.”
Santora said while the hotels will be rebranded and appear on the chain’s website on 1 July, it is a longer process to integrate their back-office systems and processes into Omni’s infrastructure. He said Omni will be able to improve performance of the hotels quickly after they’re absorbed.
“Although they were owned by KSL, (the hotels) were essentially run as independents, so by tapping into Omni’s distribution channels we feel, although the hotels have been doing extremely well, there will be a beneficial lift from a revenue perspective as well as a service perspective,” he said.
Omni has been aggressive in recent years in both developing and acquiring hotels. The chain has four hotels under development, including the 800-room Omni Nashville, which opens this summer. Earlier this year, the company purchased a 564-room Westin Hotel in Providence and rebranded it with the Omni name.
Santora said Omni is also working on other acquisitions and will “have a couple other announcements we will be making in the next 30 days.”
KSL, a Denver-based private equity firm, owns or has investments in hotels, private clubs, ski resorts and other entities. In March, the firm acquired Malmaison Group, a chain of 27 boutique hotels in the United Kingdom.