Lifestyle Hotel Manager Springboard Steps Up by Marketing Direct to Guests

25.08.2023 - 14:16 / skift.com / Sean Oneill

For years, the third-party managers of hotels have stayed behind the scenes, working on behalf of owners to staff and run properties. But Springboard Hospitality, a manager of 40 hotels in 10 U.S. states, seeks to become a consumer brand that markets its lifestyle hotels directly to travelers.

Springboard is about to relaunch its website with a redesign that spotlights the lifestyle hotels it manages and offers destination and trip- and event-planning tools.

The move comes during a surge of growth for the small Los Angeles and Honolulu-based company. It added six U.S. hotels to its portfolio in 2022 and now manages more than 6,000 rooms with a mix of independent properties and ones “flagged” with the brands of the giant hotel groups.

“We aspire to be the best independent lifestyle operator in North America,” said CEO Ben Rafter. “We want properties that tell a story.”

Rafter is a repeat grower and seller of hotel and tech businesses. (His startup Innerlinx, later called Livebid, was bought by Amazon.) The last hotel management company he led, Aqua Hospitality, sold its 58-property portfolio to Marriott Vacations Worldwide, when the giant acquired it via a purchase of Interval Leisure Group.

In 2018, Rafter joined a handful of other individual investors to buy OLS Hotels & Resorts, which had less than a dozen West Coast U.S. properties whose key owners were real-estate investment trusts Pebblebrook and LaSalle. Rafter’s team later renamed it Springboard Hospitality to capture their ambitions better.

“We bet that there’s a growing segment of travelers that crave distinctive experiences so we wanted to expand our lifestyle capability,” Rafter said.

Springboard is one of the few management companies focused on lifestyle hotels that haven’t been rolled up by larger companies, taken public, or bought by private equity. The company’s leadership sees that as a strength in nimbleness rather than a vulnerability of being outgunned.

“If you ask what’s our competitive advantage relative to our peers, I would say that the most critical thing is you know, as an owner, who you’re working with when you’re working with us,” Rafter said. “We’re not trying to grow to 500 properties.”

Smallness isn’t a virtue in the eyes of roll-up plays such as Aimbridge Hospitality, a third-party management giant so large it can get favorable terms with corporations such as Marriott and can have efficiencies of scale.

“Aimbridge, like its peers, is selling something different,” Rafter said. “What they do is great and they’re great at it. But it’s almost completely different. It’s a scale game. It can manage every Residence Inn from here to the end of the world.”

“But working with a giant comes with a bunch of manuals and rulebooks