SAN FRANCISCO—The recently created Sightline Hospitality is working to make its mark in experiential travel.
The new management company was formed last year in the merger between Kokua Hospitality and Filament Hospitality. “Sightline Hospitality is a 15-year-old start-up,” said Kirk Pederson, president, Sightline Hospitality.
The company aims to connect people with the places they’re traveling to by working with owners and investors of all sizes to explore possibilities and maximize returns.
“It is really simple,” said Pederson. “Our world in hotel management and hotel product is changing so quickly and right in front of our eyes every day. It is very evident that not only are consumers, but all of the brands, suppliers and everybody involved in our business are looking into what we are calling immersion travel. We are at a point in time where the consumer is saying to us, ‘We don’t want a vanilla box anymore. We don’t want to go somewhere because there is a bed. We want more. We want to see more. We want to experience more. We want to feel like we are getting more out of travel than just a bed to sleep in.’”
Pederson likes to call that going beyond the four walls of the hotel room. “People want to be connected to the community—go to a location that really embraces the culture,” he said. “They want to learn about that culture, and they want to feel like they are part of that culture.”
This desire for experiential travel is one reason the major players in the industry created soft brands, according to Pederson. “We all see where this is going; all of the brands created the soft brands, not only as a way to get market share, but really in response to the consumers’ request for individuality,” he said. “We feel like consumers want to make an emotional connection with everything they do, from the clothes they wear to the music they listen to, to the hotel they stay in when they travel. They want to be emotionally connected. They want that ‘feel-good.’’”
Pederson, who had been with Kokua for a year and a half before the merger, said that the company’s background was very institutional and it needed a partner that had more experience with experiential travel. “We wanted to position ourselves to be the dominant, independent third-party management company that is headquartered on the West Coast for all of these owners that are looking into doing independent and soft-branded hotels,” he said. “At Kokua, we needed that experience. We went out and talked to a lot of different groups and we ended up coming across Filament. We were really impressed with their ability to market and to tell a story. They had an entire department at Filament that focused on marketing the story and the unique, independent nature of every hotel that they managed.”
He stressed how important it was that Filament was great at conveying a property’s story. “They had the ability to take these roadside motels and convert them to Conde Nast top-50 hotels in the country. They did that through marketing. It wasn’t that the product was that much better than these other hotels, but they created experiences, they connected in the community. They marketed really well to their consumer. That was their secret sauce,” he said.
Pederson said that the two companies are a great fit. “We felt like if we were able to merge Kokua, which had that great brand experience and great institutional ownership background with this entrepreneurial, marketing-heavy, experience-driven management group in Filament, that we could create something pretty cool for all of these new hotels that were being developed or converted to soft brands or independent hotels,” he said.
Sightline now manages 21 properties, with five others signed up and in the pipeline. “We see ourselves getting up to that 30 mark pretty fast here, with the goal of getting 40-50 hotels in the portfolio,” he said. “We feel like if we can stay in that 40-50 range and really modify our portfolio based on the type of assets that we ultimately take in, that is how we are going to change as a management company. I hate to use the phrase ‘upgrade certain assets of the portfolio,’ but really, that is what we are talking about. I would rather be running a 250-room Autograph hotel in a city center, like Waikiki, than manage a 24-room retreat in a very remote location that I really don’t earn a lot of fees on. That is how we will shift as a management company over time—really changing the types of assets that we are taking on.”
The company will continue to focus on assets that have unique or independent personalities. “Those assets can be purely independent, or they can be soft-branded, or they can be branded but in destinations that are very experiential, like Waikiki,” said Pederson. “We run a 600-room Holiday Inn Express there. It is the largest Holiday Inn Express in the world, and a lot different than managing a Holiday Inn Express in Des Moines, IA. We love those kinds of hotels because we are great at working with the brands, but we can put some independence in the property as well; we can get engaged with the community like we like to do and operate them a little differently than you would operate a standard Holiday Inn Express anywhere else.”