NEW YORK — Nearing the midpoint of the year, Remington Hospitality’s chief executive said the company’s performance is ahead of pace and actively growing.
The Dallas-based hotel operator signed 17 deals in the first four months of the year, all for third-party management of hotels, Remington CEO Ben Perelmuter said in an interview at the NYU International Hospitality Investment Forum. The agreements are a mix of full-service hotels and small portfolios of upscale select-service properties.
One of Remington's newest properties is the One GT, a luxury hotel in George Town in the Cayman Islands. The 97-room property includes residences and has a rooftop pool and bar that overlook where the cruise ships pull in, he said. It’s located five minutes from Seven Mile Beach.
“It’s kind of the start of the redevelopment of George Town, and this kicks things off, so we’re real excited,” Perelmuter said.
Remington also recently assumed operations of the Aruna Resort & Villas in Ambergris Caye, Belize, further growing the company’s presence in the Caribbean and Latin America region. It has a pipeline of deals in various stages in Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Belize and Peru.
“I've never seen anything like it in terms of some of the quality assets that we've signed that either have broken ground or [will] soon break ground out there,” he said.
Every country in the Caribbean and Latin America is unique, so hotel operators can’t use a one-size-fits-all approach, Perelmuter said. There are nuances with currency, banking, regulations, employment law and other factors. The fundamentals of getting guests in and out of the resorts and managing costs don’t fluctuate much, though.
Remington has put a lot into its commercial strategy in that region because there’s a big opportunity to optimize revenue through its commercial vehicle, he said. The company has an advantage over competing third-party operators coming to the region by having been there for a few years now.
“It takes a lot of work, and it's a lot more of a lift to get acclimated into these different areas,” Perelmuter said. “Once you're in and you can start to create some scale there, then it becomes more fluid.”
Remington is focused on full-service luxury and lifestyle hotels in the region along with newer generations of select-service portfolios, he said. Achieving scale in its markets is important as that provides a better chance of hitting the key performance index targets because there are enough employees to staff at different properties and other synergies.
“That’s what we’ve focused on in the U.S.,” he said, adding Remington has concentrations in Texas, Florida, Georgia and other locations in the Southwest and Midwest with a good presence on the West Coast as well.
Remington has a lot of experience operating full-service hotels, Perelmuter said. The company has been around for decades, and its core asset class has been full-service properties.
“We have the bones, the knowledge, the infrastructure, the capabilities to handle those types of properties,” he said. “Not all groups have that experience and have that type of capacity to execute.”
For example, with food and beverage, Remington has a department focused on concepting and execution, he said. The department has experience and a history of successes opening hotel restaurants, concepting new outlets and driving costs in the right direction.
Remington has this skill set, having been part of the Ashford Group of Companies and managing hotels for the publicly traded real estate investment trusts Ashford Hospitality Trust and Braemar Hotels & Resorts, he said.
“Right now, the bones of Remington are set to execute at that level, so we take what we have and we just continue to build on it,” he said.
Despite Remington growing its third-party management operations over the years, Perelmuter said there’s still some hangover from the company's past as a former hotel owner-operator.
“Every day that moves forward with another third-party deal that we consume, we just move more toward that complete model of being a third-party operator,” he said, adding that Remington's portfolio is already 70% third-party-managed hotels with the expectation to reach 85% by the end of next year.
From a macro perspective, Remington’s hotels are seeing good lift in revenue per available room, Perelmuter said. They’re ahead of where the team anticipated they would be, driven mostly by rates and volume of group business. The second quarter has had already about double the RevPAR lift Remington saw year to date.
This summer is shaping up well despite questions earlier on over concerns about higher gas prices and other disruptions, he said.
“We have the summer fully baked from a leisure perspective,” he said. “We're ahead of pace in group for the rest of the year.”
The impact from the FIFA World Cup matches will likely come in below expectations, but the rate lift and other demand segments have been positive, Perelmuter said.
“There’s no real red flags coming off the summer” into the third and fourth quarters, he said.
The first two quarters of 2026 were fantastic in that they doubled Remington’s momentum, he said. Heading into the next quarter, it has a good shot in the arm without any major headwinds visible on the other side and being a bit ahead of pace.
“Just keeping the train on the tracks and being able to carry the uptick through the end of the year is where our heads are” along with hitting its KPIs, he said.