Wyndham Hotels & Resorts’ Black Owners and Lodging Developers (BOLD) initiative launched in July 2022 and, just six months later, had signed 18 hotels. The program designed to engage and advance more Black entrepreneurs on their path to hotel ownership has resonated with its target audience.
The past July in Miami, Hotel Business caught up with Galen Barrett, strategic franchise initiatives, Wyndham Hotels & Resorts, to discuss the BOLD events taking place at NABHOOD’s International African-American Hotel Ownership & Investment Summit & Trade Show.
The first event on the docket was the BOLD Symposium, which was held before the NABHOOD Summit got underway.
“We were able to cover a lot of different topics over those five hours,” said Barrett. “We had three distinct phases. On the front end, we did an industry overview and how Wyndham fits in that context. We had Mariana Jackson with Banco Sabadell come and give her perspective, both on the financing market, as well as industry trends. And that did a great job of setting the tone.”
Next up during the symposium was the deal analysis section, where Barrett and Morgan Mason, an underwriter on the Wyndham capital team, discussed how to prepare for the hotel ownership journey.
“On the buyer side, we discussed how to think about a deal from that seat, so that we had somebody who could like really voice that perspective,” said Barrett. “We got a lot of feedback on that conversation from the crowd that said it was innovative in a way that they hadn’t really heard, and that it was good to see someone talking about the work that needs to be done to prepare for a hotel opportunity.”
He continued, “We talked about everything from qualifying yourself to understanding what opportunities are appropriate for you—whether it’s the hotel type or the market type—and all the way through to the actual analysis and math of deal underwriting. At the end, we did roundtables, which are basically in Q&A format in a way that we have industry experts talking about real estate in detail, feasibility and market studies, as well as just the path.”
Barrett said the symposium was a success, adding, “One of the things that you think about as being a pre-conference, symposium is how many people are going to be willing to show up before a conference to do it. We thought that the participation and engagement of the folks who did come were amazing.”
A couple of days later, the program held BOLD Bootcamp, which is part of its incubator initiative, where those who have expressed interest in owning a Wyndham hotel meet to discuss what comes next.
“We have applicants who indicate interest in the BOLD program, and we pair them up with developers,” said Barrett. “What we try to do with incubators is make sure that we have the right experts and the right resources specifically for those qualified investors and interested franchisees. We are constantly doing incubators, whether it’s a one-on-one conversation that I have with someone who’s scheduled something with me next week, or we scheduled a Zoom call because we have three investors with the same question. And we were able to group those together and bring together a broker in that conversation, who could talk to them about opportunities and how to engage and interface with a broker. Incubator is the process that we’re trying to do to custom tailor and accelerate the path of investors who are really guided and have a path toward hotel ownership.”
Barrett hopes that these discussions lead to signed contracts for the development of a Wyndham hotel.
“There’s this process of planning and thinking, and it starts and it continues with programs like BOLD and others, where you are finding partners,” he said. “Then, those conversations become more advanced and more detailed around how these plans are coming together. Development is a fairly long-term exercise. If you’re dealing with new construction, things can take three to five years. And even if you’re looking at an acquisition of an existing Wyndham site, you may spend a year negotiating and understanding the terms of that process. We are really focused on having the right conversations to make the BOLD franchisee as successful as possible, irrespective of which approach they take. Whether it’s an acquisition, a conversion or a new-construction project, we are trying to make it so that they can be as successful as possible without judgment.”
