Soul Community Planet Hotels Seeks Profit in Holistic Hospitality
Skift Take
We like how this new hotel brand is testing rare concepts. It suggests a rate but lets guests haggle if they feel underwhelmed. It ties guest stays to specific, if minor, environmental and community fixes. And it opposes the trendy asset-light model.
Early Check-In
Editor’s Note: Skift Senior Hospitality Editor Sean O’Neill brings readers exclusive reporting and insights into hotel deals and development, and how those trends are making an impact across the travel industry.U.S.-based hospitality company Soul Community Planet has been growing its SCP Hotels brand at a modest clip, having reached 10 properties in only five years.
Earlier this month, it said it had acquired the 22-room Albion River Inn, a luxury boutique hotel in Albion, California. The property, to be renamed the SCPMendocino Coast Lodge, marks the brand’s fourth coastal California property. It's close to the SCPMendocino Inn & Farm, which SCP acquired in June 2022. It plans to grow its portfolio to 25 hotels by 2025. In December, it went abroad for the first time, acquiring SCP Corcovado Wilderness Lodge in Costa Rica. It won a Skift Idea Award in 2021 for its "Every Stay Does Good" program, which ties each guest visit to an impact on select charities.Ken Cruse is the co-founder and CEO of SCP Hotels. I spoke with him to get a sense of the company's strategy.
Cruse spent many years as chief financial officer and then CEO of Sunstone Hotels, the public real estate investment trust. In 2018, after having left Sunstone, Cruse, along with his wife Pamela Cruse, had an idea. "Among a segment of consumers, the idea of conscious consumerism has really taken root, yet some large legacy hotel companies had been a little bit slower to adapt to that," Cruse said. "We saw an untapped niche here in our industry to come in and go much deeper on values-based hospitality." His small private equity firm, Alpha Wave, fronted roughly $1 million to acquire hotels. By the end of 2019, SCP Hotels had three hotels and raised approximately $2.3 million of venture equity fundraising from friends and family.At the end of 2020, SCP Hotels received a $210 million investment.
This backing came from an unnamed, North-America-based private equity shop whose portfolio