Lifestyle Hotel Manager Springboard Steps Up by Marketing Direct to Guests
Photo Caption: A guest at a lifestyle hotel in Hawai'i that's independently owned. Source: Springboard Hospitality.
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Independently owned lifestyle hotels lack resources to battle against the global conglomerates with their streamlined loyalty machines. But Springboard thinks it can boost quirky properties by revamping the playbook for third-party hotel management.
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 cap
