Bashar Wali, president, Provenance Hotels

Hi, I’m Stacy Shoemaker Rauen, editor in chief of Hospitality Design magazine, with HD‘s What I’ve Learned podcast. Today, I chatted with Bashar Wali who left Syria 30 years ago, and as he said, got bit by the hospitality bug in school. Now he’s president of Provenance Hotels with 14 and counting, which are fiercely independent and full of human connections. As you will hear, he’s not in the hotel business, but in the theater business—always striving to create those memorable experiences.

Stacy Shoemaker Rauen: Hi, we’re here with Bashar Wali of Provenance Hotels. Bashar, thank you so much for joining us here in New York.

Bashar Wali: Thank you for having me.

SSR: We’re talking what I’ve learned. Let’s start in your childhood. Where did you grow up?

BW: I grew up in Damascus, Syria—a long way away from here.

SSR: When did you come to the states?

BW: In fact, last week was my 30th anniversary.

SSR: Oh, congratulations.

BW: Thank you.

SSR: How many years did you spend in Syria, then?

BW: I was 17 when I left, so really most of my life has been here. A lot more than there.

SSR: And what was it like growing up there? Was design part of it? Was hospitality part of it?

BW: That part of the world is probably similar to an Istanbul: the colors, the textures, the silk route, if you will. I was really always interested in design, and all kinds of design, particularly in fabric and textures and textiles, which that part of the world is very infamous for.

SSR: And did your parents have any influence on your career?

BW: None.

SSR: You came here to go to school then.

BW: Yep.

SSR: And what did you study at school?

BW: Hotel restaurant institutional management.

SSR: Oh, so you knew what you wanted to do.

BW: Actually not. It was sort of a coincidence. It was a path to come to the great US of A, and that was one avenue that I could get myself into a school for, and got into it, and fell into it, and never left.

SSR: Was school just the start of you loving it?

BW: Yeah, it really was. I tell people that work for us: ‘Hospitality is a bug. Once you catch it, you can’t get rid of it,’ and I caught it early on.

SSR: You started your career at Starwood. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

BW: It was really early Starwood, if you will. I worked for small company in New England that had a bunch of Sheraton hotels, and kind of cut my teeth on the industry with them. Shortly thereafter, [Barry] Sternlicht bought ITT Sheraton, and then Starwood was was formed. That was entry into Starwood, those early Starwood days.

SSR: And what were you doing?

BW: In fact, my first job was in the hotel in Newton, Massachusetts. I was a bellman, and I wore a Beefeater uniform, believe it or not. I made a lot of money from tips who wanted to take pictures with me, but otherwise, I started from the ground up, and from there, I have literally worked every job in the industry.

SSR: Why did you decide to move over, a couple years later, to Grand Heritage Hotels?

BW: When the company I worked for got acquired by Starwood. I was always a small company guy. I didn’t really want to work for big companies, and Starwood was sort of burgeoning at the time, acquiring like crazy, and I wanted human scale. Grand Heritage Hotels did mostly historic hotels, which were very, very unique and far more exciting than your run-of-the-mill branded hotel.

SSR: And can you tell us one project that you remember, or one hotel that you remember working on with Grand Heritage that sticks with you?

BW: One of the most iconic hotels we had in the collection is still there today, is the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado. It’s a really interesting project, historic building that The Shining movie was sort of based there, and brought us a ton of unwanted traffic through the hotel. There was the infamous room 217, for which we could not keep a room number on it, because people would come and rip it off the wall. It was a fascinating project, and really kind of taught me all about historic buildings and those old ladies that, no matter how much love and attention you give them, they still want more, and more, and more. And I really fell in love with historic buildings through that project.

SSR: And were you doing operations for them?

BW: At that time, I had sort of transitioned into capital deployment, financing, more of the real estate side of the business. I was looking after a lot of the capital expenditures we had going on there.

SSR: Looking back at Starwood, at Grand Heritage, before you moved on to Provenance, was there one lesson learned early in your career, something that you’ve kept with you for the rest of your [career]?

BW: Projects, time, quality, and budget. Pick two. You never get three, and no matter how hard you try, you have to be realistic about the expectations going in, so understanding that going into a project, especially when you’re dealing with historic buildings, kind of gives you a lot of context and it allows you to take things in stride, and not stress out about things that go wrong, because they will often, as you know.

SSR:  And you say on your LinkedIn page—I love this. I’m going to quote it—’I love creating experiences that elevate humans, that make them feel respected, cared for, deeply rested, fed, nourished, and refreshed.’ Can you explain that a bit?

BW: I think we, at hotels, have sort of often wanted to make hotels feel like home, which is fantastic. That’s one piece of it. You want to make sure guests feel comfortable and feel cared for, and feel they actually are at home. But we often forget the fact that people don’t go to hotels to go home. They want to escape from their home, and I think we forget about the aspirational part of staying in hotels, whether it’s design or service, people often come to hotels to learn from what we do in hotels, to bring home with them. I think really focusing on that aspirational piece of what we do.

We talk a lot about, recently in our company, about intentional and thoughtful. Everything we do has to be intentional and thoughtful. Don’t just throw a piece of art on the wall because it looks good. Make sure that it has a purpose that helps you tell the story that you’re trying to tell. And then effortless is another word, and that’s sort of home. When you walk in your house, it’s effortless. You know where everything is. You know how to do things. You know how to turn lights on and off. We try to get too cute sometimes in hotels, and make it hard for people to find their way, so we really focus on those really basic intentional, thoughtful, and effortless.

SSR: Which is sometimes easier said than done, right?

BW: Definitely. Especially, again, back to historic buildings. You can’t always do it the way that you want, because of the buildings and the bones of the buildings.

SSR: What attracted you go to Provenance after leaving Grand Heritage?

BW: Again, really a small company that was doing very, very, interesting things. And before art was a thing in hotels, they were doing it really early on. The founder of the company’s a big collector of art, and it really meant a lot to him, so again, we [wove] the story around art. It wasn’t about a rich guy with a bunch of art in his warehouse that he wanted to throw on a hotel wall, it was far more thoughtful than that. That was really interesting. At the time, again, this was early 2000s when art in hotels was still coming out of the American Hotel Register catalogue.

SSR: And has there been one project that you’ve worked on, or one hotel that you think really defines what Provenance is? Or what you’re trying to do with the company?

BW: Maybe not defined, but a breakaway from the norm. We’ve just finished a hotel in Palm Springs—a small hotel, about 40 rooms. It’s really, really interesting, called Villa Royale. It’s an old midcentury modern hotel in Palm Springs. We took it and kind of DIY with a bunch of craftsmen, We really handcrafted that experience, and it’s been very well received and resonated with people. It’s just one of those places where you go and you relax automatically. The minute you walk through the door, you find yourself relaxing. Nothing luxury, nothing pretentious, but very, very cool and it feels of that market and of that era.

SSR: Going back to what you said in your LinkedIn page, is that somewhat of what you’re trying to do with Provenance is really create these places of escape, of something different, of aspirational?

BW: We are against the grain, if you will. Everybody seems to be jumping on the brand bandwagon. Every company that’s coming up has a brand that they’re sort of taking across the U.S. And we are one of the few left that literally handcraft every single experience. It has its own name. It has its own branding, its own story, its own team that we assemble for it. We continue to think about the world that way. Our business has been referred to as lifestyle and boutique and independent, and that’s the one that we use the most, independent, because each one is one-of-a-kind. As the market gets crowded with brands, it’s easy to stand out when you have one-of-a-kind, but it’s obviously harder from a growth perspective. It just makes it harder to grow one at a time, as opposed to mass producing 20 of the same across the U.S.

SSR: It also makes your job more exciting and difficult.

BW: That’s exactly right.

SSR: You recently did a talk at the Independent Lodging Congress, and loved it. It was titled WTF. And three points that resonated with me were, it’s all about emotional intelligence, it’s the small things that really matter, and execution eats strategy for breakfast. Can you maybe elaborate on those three, or one of those three?

BW: I think our industry has gotten away from our focus on emotional intelligence. We focus more on checklists. Services become more of a checklist. Here are the 20 things you have to do, and you have to use the guest name three times, and you have to do this, that, and the other, which often one can do, but not be genuine with what they do. I think emotional intelligence is really about reading your customer, and understanding what they want. The hell with the checklists and the brand standards, give people what they want. Understanding how to read someone is really, really important. I touched on this in my talk. Hotels have done these transactional mystery shops, and those are important because you want to make sure you’re hitting all the points, but we, again, lose sight of the emotional part of it, so we now do these emotional-based mystery shops where we ask someone, ‘How do we make you feel?,’ rather than, ‘Did we ask you to help you with your luggage? Did we use your name? How did we make you feel?’ because I can hit all those things without really being kind or genuine, so those have been very eye-opening, to allow us to understand, are we hitting it on both sides of the aisle, the standards piece, but then also the emotional intelligence.

And then, the details. Our business is a business of 1,000 details. You can’t do one thing right and forget the rest. You have to really focus on the little things. I sort of say, we hoteliers spent so much money on building our sundae, but we’ve cheap in the end, and we don’t want to put the cherry on top. And without the cherry on top, it’s not a sundae. Those are the details that matter. What magazines are in the lobby? Don’t get them because they’re pretty, get them because they’re on point for your brand. What coffee table books are in there? What’s the scent? What are the candles? What’s the lighting level? All those details that make a huge difference, we tend to forget about.

And then, ultimately, that quote that execution eats strategy for breakfast, we all love to talk about what we’re going to do, but at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what I think, what matters is what that night auditor alone at two o’clock in the morning, what are they doing, and how are they interacting with my customers? Making sure we execute what we talk about is really what matters, rather than manifestos and all these fancy ways of saying things that we do, but we end up not delivering the results at the end.

SSR: I love how you travel. When you go to stay in a city, you don’t stay in the same hotel room two nights in a row.

BW: Or ever again.

SSR: Can you tell me a little bit about a) why and b) anything that you’ve taken away from this experience?

BW: You know, I need my street cred somehow, and that’s the only way I get my street cred now. [I’ve stayed in] 171 hotels in New York thus far. No brands and no economy scale. I’m almost running out, but New York keeps surprising me with more supply. And you know why? Early on, it was I wanted to speak with confidence when I talked about my industry, and how can I walk in the room and speak with confidence about independent hotels if I tell you, ‘Oh, I stay at the Mandarin all the time?’  What does that really mean? Ultimately, I decided that it’s truly the best way to learn, in some sense, what not to do, but in some cases, as well, what to do. I see a lot of great things along the way through my travels that I bring back with me. Ultimately though, doing it has allowed me to really get a better sense of what’s happening in our industry, and really focusing in on what matters.

What I bring with me, interestingly enough—people ask me all the time—171 hotels, they all kind of blend together, and whether it’s the Baccarat or whether it’s Crosby, or Whitby, or anything in-between, truthfully, the only thing that I ever bring with me is when someone gets out of their way and genuinely gives a damn. That is literally the only thing I ever remember. Fine, there’s crystal at Baccarat, there’s this here and that there. I never remember any of it, or see any of it, but when someone, again, gets out of their way and genuinely gives a damn, that always stays with me. And those are the hotels I would consider going back to when I run out of hotels in New York.

SSR: Has there been one example of somebody going out of their way for you, that you remember? Or one time you’ve done it, maybe, at Provenance?

BW: I mean, I’d love to say we do it all the time. We don’t. I wish we did. Sometimes, people blow me away with the things they do. A recent example at one of our hotels, an older lady was coming to a birthday party at the hotel, takes the streetcar, and gets off two stops too late. And she calls, and she’s lost and dazed and confused. And literally, the front desk person hung up, said, ‘Wait right there.’ Got out of the hotel, got on the train, went two stops, got her, and brought her back. That’s incredible, right? Doesn’t matter how much the rate it, doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter. That’s what that someone will remember. I see those along my travels. Unfortunately, they’re far and few in-between, but those are the things that matter. At the end of the day, if you can make someone feel special, and feel cared for, they’ll come back to you all the time. We want attention, right? We all want it. It doesn’t matter what kind of marble you use, if you make me feel special, I’m yours. I’ll always come back to you.

SSR: Out of 171 hotels in New York, what kind of pet peeves have you gathered along the way?

BW: I am a water pressure fanatic. Listen, I live in Portland, so I get that whole green thing. We live and breathe green out on the left coast, but this green thing in hotels has gone to the extreme. When you go to the faucet and you’re trying to do a Russian ballet in front of the faucet to make it work, it kind of loses its appeal. Water pressure, to me, is really, really important, and I think those who know me, know I travel with a wrench to take the shower head off in every hotel I go to, to take the water regulator out. If you want to save Mother Earth, great, let me do it by choice, don’t force it on me. And I’ll do it in every other way, except water pressure. And that is my biggest pet peeve. For a guy that has no hair, by the way. I don’t know why that matters so much, but here we are.

SSR: And I still don’t know how you get the wrench through TSA.

BW: I often lose it. Actually, the wrench is easy. It’s now the water flow restrictors are integral to the shower head, so I have to travel around with a needle-nosed plier to actually yank it out there, and that doesn’t make TSA half the time. I buy them by the case from Amazon.

SSR: You see a lot, obviously. What do you see happening in the industry? What’s changing? What are you paying attention to? In either hotels or F&B, because F&B’s such an important part of your hotels and the overall experience.

BW: Definitely. It’s interesting. Our industry is one of copying. One more Edison bulb and one more chevron pattern. We sort of love to copy each other, which is great. And I’m often thinking about the next thing. This really good friend of mine, who’s a hotel geek in his own right, he and I were talking and I said, ‘You know, I’m trying to figure out what is the next thing.’ And he said something that really resonated with me. He said, ‘You know what? Enough of the next thing. Let’s think about the other thing. Let’s break away from the herd and think about how to do things differently, and not keep copying each other and upping the ante, and upping the ante. And at the end, it starts all blending together, and it all looks the same.’

Thinking about the other thing, for me, has really been, again, this concept of humans, and this concept of we all want to be part of something bigger than we are. And again, figuring out the emotional intelligence piece, and how to really create that human connection with guests, with employees, with customers, with partners, and honing in on what our industry is all about, which is this hospitality thing is done with humans, not with things. I’ve been really focusing a lot more about, in an age of robot room service and kiosk check-in, and all that business, how do we get away from that and still maintain the efficiencies that you get with technology, but not eliminating the human element out of our industry, which again, as I mentioned earlier, traveling through the country, it’s the only thing that resonates with me, yet we continue to try to remove it out of our industry. I think that’s where we’re headed. People are sort of revolting against the machine, as it were, and really focusing on spending more quality time together, and being part of something bigger than they are. And this whole coworking, co-living thing, is living proof that that’s how people want to live. They want to live together and not be isolated.

SSR: It’s almost a backlash to our tech-crazed world. Which we see a lot in the magazine and talk a lot about. And speaking of tech, how do you feel about Airbnb? What’s your view of it?

BW: You know, as most of my colleagues in the industry would love to see Airbnb go away, I am at least smart enough to know it’s not going anywhere, and anyone who thinks otherwise, has got their head buried in the sand. I have this theory about Airbnb. I think there are two kinds of Airbnb customers. There’s the couch surfer, who wants to pay $25 a night. That’s not our customer. Never will be. Let them be. And then there is the creative person, the creative director at an agency somewhere, who says, ‘I want to come to Brooklyn and really experience Williamsburg, experience that neighborhood.’ I think that customer, Airbnb has taken away from us, and the burden is on us to try to get them back, and the way we get them back is by doing. And again, here we go with the execution versus strategy. How do we do authentic things that bring the community in, that creates that sense of community, that sense of place with the hotel, without sacrificing what you would have to at an Airbnb, which is, is that a smoke detector or is that a camera? Who else has a key to my apartment, condo, or whatever? When was the last time the shower was cleaned?

A hotel room has this magical effect on people, where once that door closes, your inhibitions are gone. You do whatever you want. You can never get that at Airbnb. And at the end of the day, if we’re giving you that authentic (and I hate that word, by the way, because it means nothing)  experiences that are really based in their local community, you eliminate that issue. I give you what you want, without you having to sacrifice all the things that you have to with Airbnb. And it’s interesting, because with Airbnb, if you think about it, 100 percent of the time it’s about the host (what the rules are, when can I get the key, what do I do with the towels, do I have to do this, do I have to do that) versus, in a hotel, the minute you walk in the door, it’s 100 percent about you, the guest. And I think Airbnb will struggle to make it be like we have been for a long time; about the guest, and not about the host by virtue of the rules and regulations.

SSR:  How do you hire for Provenance? I mean, it’s such a key part to make what you want happen.

BW: It is definitely. And it’s the hardest thing we are dealing with right now, the industry at large. And frankly, any other industry. Unemployment is basically zero, and it’s impossible to find good help. We actually have a thing at Provenance. We say we want to hire professional crushes. And you know, through my travels, I meet a lot of amazing people that I have professional crushes on, and we literally have a list that we share between us, those four or five of us that travel, that we sort of nurture those relationships, back to human connections, and we continue to nurture those relationships. I may meet you tomorrow and I have no use for you today, but I’ll keep in touch with you, and I’ll make sure that we engage. And we, again, have crushes on each other, as it were, and when the time comes that I have something for you, I have someone to call on.

Again, it’s really hard to do, but this whole putting ads and hiring headhunters, it seems so impersonal. I’d rather meet the person myself. I spend a lot of my time having drinks with amazing folks that I meet across this industry that we keep in touch with over time. But it’s really, really hard, make no mistake about it. Ultimately, you can teach people skills, but chemistry is really important to me. If you like the people you work with, you spend so much time with them as you know.

SSR: And that’s a big part for hiring designers for your properties, I’m sure, as well.

BW: It’s the most important. I get asked all the time, ‘What’s the criteria? How do you do it?’ Largely, it’s anyone that makes it, to me, is qualified.  It’s not about that. And everybody has done really amazing work, but we kind of have to get along and like each other and have to have a healthy tension between us, because otherwise, if we hate each other, what’s the point? Life’s too short, and if everything I tell you, you say yes to, then you’re not really challenging me, and you’re just a yes man or woman, and we don’t want that. Chemistry is really, really important. I want to do business with people I like, as I’m sure they do. Life’s too short. Why do business with people you don’t want to be with or spend time with?

SSR: Are there any kind of hints or tools you can tell our audience about what do you look for in a presentation, or in the first meeting, or anything. I know chemistry is a big part of it, but beyond that.

BW: Brevity. I know, as an interviewer, I hate all those interview questions. Where do you see yourself in five years? Tell me about a time, blah, blah, blah, blah. When I’m meeting with a designer, I want to know about them. What excites them personally? Where do you like to travel? What’s your favorite restaurant in the city, and why? What fashion designers are you looking at? Because those tell me a lot about a person, as opposed to some canned presentation that they picked the best work out of everything they’ve done and put it together. I want to get to know the person, then I’ll worry about the work that they’ve done. I try to spend a lot of the early time talking to folks as really getting to know them as people first and designers second. And I spend a lot of that time, again, on that. I want to get to know you before I get to know your work.

SSR: And how do you guys start a hotel? Each one’s different. Each one has its own story. You found the building, you’re getting ready. You’re hiring the designer. What’s next?

BW: Lots of pinot noir flows through our veins, as we sit around the table. One of first things we do is we say, ‘What’s missing?’ in any given market. Because again, just lobbing on another boutique hotel, whatever that means, seems counterintuitive. We say, ‘What’s missing in any given market? What’s over-represented? What’s under-represented? Can we find a niche unique enough to allow us to stand out and give a unique offering in that market?’ And it’s getting harder and harder, as you know. There’s so much really great things out there.

Once we figure out if there’s a missing niche, then we say, ‘Okay, well why does this building exist? What’s happened here? What’s the history of this building? This corner, this block, this neighborhood?’ And we try to find something that resonates. And again, I’m going to throw out another term that’s so overused that I hate now, is this sort of storytelling. There has to be a story behind why this thing exists, as opposed to, ‘Oh yeah, I just woke up today and decided to do a whatever hotel on the whatever corner.’ Figuring out if there’s a story there.

I often get asked what business I’m in, and I love this analogy. I use it all the time. I say I’m in the theater business. I can go to Times Square, buy the best piece of real estate, spend a billion dollars building the most incredible, iconic building with beautiful crystal and marble and handcarved wood, and, and, and, and, and. Have a mediocre story and mediocre actors, nobody will care about my theater. Because people don’t go to the theater to look at the building.

I go 10 blocks off Times Square, find a good enough building, and a good enough building is one that’s safe, that’s warm when it needs to be warm, and cool when it needs to be cool, comfortable. I focus my energy, time, and money on creating an amazing story; hiring and retaining incredible actors and actresses to tell the story; and interior design then becomes the set. And the set may need to be gold and diamond, but it also may need to be garbage cans and found objects. It doesn’t matter as long as it’s creative to me, telling the story, the world will line around the corner and will want to see this show. We really are in the show business, not in the building business. Again, we lose sight of that. We all want to outdo each other. They don’t take the hotel with them, they take the experience with them. We’re in the business of invoking feelings, and you do those through storytelling. Finding a story that will resonate, and really honing in on the continuity of the story, the authenticity of the story, is what we spend most of our time on. You know, sometimes it comes to us in a minute, and sometimes it takes a very, very long time.

SSR: And I think you learn a lot from your successes, as much as your failures. Has there been something that you thought might work that didn’t work?

BW: We foolishly thought that Portland, Oregon was ready for luxury. ‘I want somebody to iron my socks and hang my clothes for me and monogram my initials on the pillow,’ and people don’t go to Portland, Oregon looking for that. In fact, it seems so counterintuitive. A project that we’d done recently, we kind of went down that path and realized quickly that tableside cooking and all that sort of hoity-toity stuff is lost on people there. And even though some people that come to that market, that had expected it, they don’t expect it in that market, so it seems counterintuitive. But, you know, we adjusted course very quickly, and kind of updated the branding and updated the story to be more on-point. And not to say that it’s so on-point that it’s thematic. We hate the word ‘theme.’ But the idea that, make sure you give people what they expect, and don’t try to force anything on them. Back to that again. We thought that would work, and it didn’t, and we had to correct it.

SSR: And so, on the flip side of that, what have been, you think, in your 30-plus year career, some of your secrets to success, things that you’ve learned along the way?

BW: Simplicity. We again, we overthink and overcomplicate, and the projects that we let them be, let the canvas be what it wants to be, and don’t force anything on it, and just back to effortless and intentional, those have really been the best projects that we’ve done. Hiring the brand name designer, and the brand name whatever, and all of that, you think you’re doing all the right things, and at the end, it doesn’t work as well as the ones that you did because you had no budget and no time, and you kind of did them very DIY. Those seem to be the ones that do the best. I think, trying to not overcomplicate what we do. I was talking earlier about, this is not rocket science.  Our industry is really pretty simple. We tend to overcomplicate it, so I think simplifying what we do, and at the end of the day, focusing on what the guests want and how they interact with the room. It’s funny, with all my travels, I literally have a system when I walk in a room. I should be able to do it blindfolded. I put my bag on the luggage rack, hang the stuff, put this here, and that there, and plug in the computer. And yet, often I find myself having to do human origami to get under the bed to plug my computer in. That’s not thoughtful, right? They focus more on things that don’t matter. Holistically, it all matters, obviously, but you can’t let form win over function, or function over form. You have to find the right balance. Doing things simple and thoughtful is where we win, often.

SSR: Tell us a little about how many hotels you have at Provenance, and what’s next? What are you looking at?

BW: We have 14 hotels this year, and we have four or five in the pipeline. What’s next? I am focusing on really, really hard at how people live, not at trends. You think about how people live today, and how it’s changing, right? I think about my kids. They’ll go home, ‘What’s for dinner? We don’t like it.’ ‘Okay, what are you going to do?’ ‘I’ll Postmates something,’ right? You think about Uber, and you think about all these things that are happening, and how people’s lives are changing. Not trends again, but just how we live.

We’re starting to think a lot about that, and how that translates into hotels. These digital nomads that can work anywhere, how can we give them some venue in a hotel tour? We’re starting to think does coworking marry with hotels? I travel and ultimately I end up having to take meetings, and I either huddle up at a coffee shop or I go take up a table at a restaurant. It’s never conducive to doing business. If I could rent a desk in a hotel, where I could leave my computer and have hotel services, I’m willing to pay you for it. $100, $200 bucks a day? No problem.

If you think about solving a problem and creating a revenue stream, a small piece of coworking in a hotel could do really well. Again, you have to be proven, so we’re starting to think about how human behavior is changing and how can we adapt to it, and create environments that help people continue to live the way that they live, where they live when they travel, rather than, again, forcing our way on them. We’re thinking about that a lot.

And then, as a company, we got tired of fighting for assets in the primary gateway markets: San Francisco, New York, Miami, and Boston, so we’re starting to think about the secondaries, because Every City, USA wants a cool boutique hotel, and no, they don’t want a Hilton Garden Inn and an Applebee’s to be their pride and joy, so we’re starting to look a lot at those cities that don’t have those offerings and say, ‘They deserve them too.’ Obviously, you have to build right, and not get over your skis, because economically, those markets can only handle so much. We’re starting to focus on secondaries and tertiaries, mostly in the Midwest and the Great Plains, as opposed to hovering around the corners of the country and the coasts. We’ll see how that strategy pans out in this next cycle, but so far it’s been really good for us, and it’s allowed us to do some really, really unique projects in markets. I would never thought we would have done anything in.

SSR: Any hints at any of those markets?

BW: Midwest mostly. We’ve already announced a couple projects, one in Madison and one in Milwaukee. Milwaukee, for anyone who hasn’t been, what a great underrated market: great cost of living, art, food, drinks. It’s a great, great city. Madison, same. We’re looking in Indiana at a couple other projects, so there’s a lot of fantastic places in this great country of ours. It doesn’t all begin and end with New York, although it is my favorite city, but nonetheless, I think there are some amazing cities out there that we’re focusing on and paying a lot of attention to.

SSR: And you have a hotel opening in Boston.

BW: I do. In three days, and then one in Portland 10 days thereafter. It’s a busy December for us. Boston is a really unique hotel market. In our opinion, it’s old-fashioned in a way. It hasn’t really been influenced by all of the amazing new things you’re seeing in New York. This is a unique offering that we have. It’s an old YWCA that we’re converting to a hotel, and we’re also trying to do a coworking component there. We’ll see how Boston receives it, but certainly the depth of the market is great. We love Boston. It’s my old stomping ground, and I’m excited about it.

SSR: And looking back, starting to where you were to where you are today, is this what you wanted. Is this where you wanted to be or did you happen to fall upon where you think you should be?

BW: A week ago, 30 years ago in the United States, which is an incredible opportunity. I never thought in a million years I’d be where I am. I’m exceedingly humbled and thankful for where I’ve gotten. All of it with hard work, no silver spoon. But a great proof that the American Dream is alive and well, and if you work hard, it’s there for the taking. I hope that America is as proud of me as I am of her, having spent 30 years here, and I’ve been rewarded for it. No, not in a million years did I think I’d be where I am today, and I’m very thankful.

SSR: Well, we’re thankful you were here today.

BW: Thank you.

SSR: And thanks so much for taking the time to catch up with us.

BW: Thank you.