The Modern Hotelier #198: Microcations, Adventure Travel, Luxury Sleep Experiences & More | Hospitality Hot Topics
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Steve Carran: Welcome to another episode of The Modern Hotelier. This episode, we're looking back at what happened in the month of July in another episode of Hospitality Hot Topics. Today we are gonna be joined by Ryan Rivett, the President, and CEO of my Place hotels. Thanks for joining us, Ryan. How you doing today?
Ryan Rivett: Happy to be here, Steve. I've had a great morning so far and I'm looking forward to carrying it on with a good conversation with you guys.
Steve Carran: Good. Good. And yeah, we're excited to share what happened this month and get your perspective, especially, you know, as a CEO of my place hotel, seeing what you're seeing in the industry. The first topic I wanna dive into, we had a big win for those people who are holding out on getting TSA pre-check.
The TSA officially ended its nearly two decade old policy requiring travelers to remove their shoes at airport security, noting that there's been an advancement in technology that we no longer need to need to remove our shoes. Ryan, what are your thoughts on this big win? Correct. Are you a  TSA or have you been holding out.
Ryan Rivett: You know, it's kind of amazing. I am TSA and it's kind of amazing that it's taken two decades or more to advance technology to the point where you don't have to take off your shoes. I've never been. I've never really had a strong argument one way or the other for it because, you know, on the other side of the argument, on the other side of the convenience argument is the safety argument.
And I think in that environment, everybody's happy, well, so to speak, with being over the top on security. But with all the technology we have I think it's well timed and from our standpoint as, hoteliers, anything that can get the guests to our hotel at the end of the day in a better mood gives us a better opportunity to outperform, competitors or their last stay or at least meet their expectations. And so, uh, I think it's interesting. Let's see how, uh, how much more efficient it makes the process and, uh, what else they can improve on in that environment going forward. So I think it's a big.
Steve Carran: Nice, nice. David, what are your thoughts on this? I know you have TSA pre-check, so it doesn't quite affect you as much, but what do you think?
David Millili: You know, Ryan made a good point. Anything to just make the journey easier. for whether it be the airline passengers, the hotel guest, I'm all for that. I mean, we'll see how it goes, because I know even going through TSA, people still don't understand that you can keep your jacket on.
You can keep your laptop in your back. So it's gonna be interesting to see how many people still just keep taking their shoes off even though they don't need to. But I think this is a big win for travelers and it's, a like Ryan said, it's, it's great that the technology's there and that we're able to just kind of stay, take a step forward, no pun intended.
Steve Carran: Absolutely. And those people who are always the last minute packers don't have to worry about matching socks anymore. So little less anxiety gonna the airport.
David Millili: And so another thing, so travel pulls came out with this whole report around the micro locations and how they're surging this summer, these kind of short trips. So Steve, you do a lot of camping. What, what is your view on microcations and what do you think that means moving forward?
Steve Carran: I mean, I love this and I'm a fan. I do not a lot, but I enjoy these smaller vacations where it is, you know, 1, 2, 3 nights away. I saw the average tripper was around four nights, which I tend to do a little shorter, nice little weekend getaways to recharge, so yeah, 34% of Americans. Are planning their first vacation of the year and it's two nights or less. So I thought that was an interesting stat but Ryan, I'm curious to see if you have, uh, seen this on your side with my place hotels.
Ryan Rivett: You know, I think if you go back. Say over the last, at least 25 years here, since, since the turn of the century, we've had, progressively more frequent and less lengthy vacationers coming through our hotels. I mean, and I think now we're seeing a bigger rise in it and, and the trend line get more inverted because of, just really the intelligence tools that we have.
We've come a long ways in terms of understanding the reason for stay, the travel path, the booking path inside of the technology in our hotels. And I think, you know, by and large, the hotel industry is still behind the curve in terms of technology development. But I'll say over the last. Over the last five to 10 years, the advancements that we've seen in terms of our ability to attract guests and why they're staying has significantly improved.
So maybe the trend has been coming for quite a long time. These, you know, micro locations as they're calling them. but today we have more information to understand them a little bit better. And I personally, I'm certainly of that, recipe for all of our trips. I mean, I rarely am gone more than.
Three days, on a vacation trip, and generally on a work trip, I'm usually, you know, two to three days. Anyway, so that's, that's my mo and I understand it really well. And I think if I look at our transient guests across the chain from that perspective. One thing we don't necessarily always know is where they go after they leave is that, is, is their stop with us a two day micro location that leads into another one, or, or are they headed back home right away?
So I'm interested to see that, that understanding of the guest's path, both before and after the stay with us, continue to develop. But I expect this to be something that sticks around for quite a while.
Steve Carran: I'm with you. So the next trend we're seeing is experiential travel. We've been talking about this all year, but more people are focused on. The adventure side of this, the amount of travelers doing adventure travel has dropped a little bit about 33, 37%, but the revenue from these travel experiences has rose 73%, so more, less people traveling.
But will the people that are, are willing to spend a lot more money on this, Ryan. Excited from your perspective on this. Sturgis is coming up in, uh, South Dakota. Huge event for any motorcycle riders. Obviously a good adventure trip right there whatcha seeing with adventure travel?
Ryan Rivett: Sturgis is maybe the penultimate adventure travel type type deal. You take a community of 10,000 people and it swells to 800,000 for 10 days once a year. It's wild. Uh, I've spent a lot of time out there during the Sturgis bike rally and, and, um. Have experienced in a lot of different, from a lot of different perspectives too.
But you know, I think seeing adventure travel spike as much as it did in, in 2020 and into 21 where people were trying to get out of the metros and the, and the populated hubs and get to places where they could still have a vacation, but not be in a dense population, not necessarily have to go through the airport.
I mean, we saw over the road travel increase significantly during that period of time. And one thing that, that I'm, pretty aware of in terms of the locations that we have is, well, a lot of the adventure travel destinations, say the national parks and state parks and things like that, uh, while they're really heavily seasonal.
They're also generally substantially higher in rate than the, than during their seasons, than their typical markets. And so it makes sense that that revenue has increased substantially in spite of the fact that we've seen that adventure travel those destinations level off a little bit. but we're continuing in 25 to see places like Moab, Utah, for example, or, here in the Black Hills, over the summertime, between Sturgis and all the other, attractions that are there, you know, those two, just to name a couple, have, really been strong and for all the same reasons It's, it's family travelers. It's groups of, you know, uh, adult couples getting together, going, it's going and, and then having a good time or, you know, the guy trips or the ladies trips for hiking, whatever it is.
There's a lot of it happening. So while the stat says that that's dropped off a bit, I don't know. I think we'll see consistency in that going forward just because, uh, there are probably a lot of people that didn't value those types of destinations as much until they experienced it during the pandemic period and now have said, Hey, this is the thing for me I'm gonna keep going.
Steve Carran: I agree with you a hundred percent. Those people that have done it are a hundred percent more likely to do it again. I mean, you mentioned Moab. I've been there and I went one time and I'm addicted, like I can't wait to go back. It's an incredible space. So, David, what about you? Any adventure travel coming up on your end?
David Millili: I don't have any adventure travel, but I think part of it is not just getting away from cities, but just getting away from your devices. you know, the one thing I've noticed is just that. You know, you guys know this. Everybody knows it, who's listening or watching your phone is with you. And that urge, you know, just that idea of like having your significant other or your kids put their devices down has become so, so challenging.
So I think, you know, when you're doing adventure travel, you can't, you can't be on Instagram. I mean, maybe you're gonna take a couple pictures of what you're doing, but, so I think it's getting away from just, not only the noise, physical noise, but the noise of, you know, that device that's in your hand or the internet in general.
Ryan Rivett: It's so hard to commit to though. I mean, it's daunting when you're preparing for a trip where you know you're gonna be out of service for a little while, and once you get there, it's the most refreshing thing in the world. It's fantastic.
David Millili: So after you take your adventure travel, you're need gonna need to get some really good sleep. So there's this whole movement around kind of the luxury sleep experience, Equinox Hotels as a two night package. So. You know, as we look at more and more creative ways to get people into hotels, you know, it'd be great to see what you think, Steve, of this kind of a little bit of a trend now of people just trying to get away to sleep.
Steve Carran: This is my type of trend. I absolutely love it. whenever I travel, I never sleep well at hotels for some reason. Some I sleep. Better than others. But for if I'm gonna be traveling, I would love to have a great night of sleep. They have PM routines, all things to really maximize your sleep and they track it, how well you're doing and give you advice on, on how to best optimize your sleep and recovery.
So I'm all about it. I would love to try this out. the 80 R is about 1700 a night, so. Little prier than I would like, but I mean, where the luxury section is going, I think sleep is gonna be a big part of that along with that wellness section as well. Ryan, what are you thinking? Or, uh, are we adding any luxury sleep packages for my place coming up?
Ryan Rivett: You know, I think the context of, uh. Equinox and programming like that is maybe a little challenging for us to work into ours. and it's not something I'm totally familiar with, to be honest. I, this is a new concept that, you gotta kind of get your arms wrapped around. But as I read into it a little bit and, and trying to understand the, the purpose, obviously there's, there's, there's a bit of a benefit there, uh, in terms of health and wellness that, that they're really focusing on, but to some degree it sort of fits into that adventure travel bubble, right? That experience travel where you've got people going to places to, to stay in unique hotels, ice hotels and, and, lots of different things like that. Treehouse hotels and stuff like that. There's, I stayed at a place in Hawaii one time, this has been probably 10, 12 years ago now, where, the hotel rooms were all individual units and they were all yurts tense. And that was kind of an interesting experience. It was one of those things where, uh, somebody said, Hey, we gotta try this out. And it wouldn't have been my first option. And, um, I, I thought it was pretty cool.
So I think those, those, those experiences are important. How scalable they are, how widespread they become, you know, I think things like that end up becoming front runners for subsequent development that can work itself into our hotels, right? On a, on a more scalable basis. So we start looking at some of the technology factors that they've in implemented in their program and how we can scale those, in a meaningful way inside of our individual more. Typical hotel room.
So, where your $130 a night ha room has some of the same elements that those $1,700 a night rooms have is why we should all be paying attention to that, right? From an operator, from a developer's perspective. So I'm curious. I'm gonna pay attention to it, don't know if it's in my travel plans anytime soon, but might look for an opportunity. We'll see.
Steve Carran: There you go. There you go. So, a new type of resort is being opened. Not a new type, but kind of a new branded style sports Illustrated announced another property. They are opening, they are opening Nashville now in the. In 2026, along with a planned resort they have in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, they're focused on the Sports Illustrated storytelling, hospitality, really tailored toward the sports fan showcasing fitness, dining, entertainment, and destination experiences.
I'm excited about this. I feel like it kind of has the ESPN zone kind of feel with the hotel. Ryan, what are your thoughts on this? You gonna be checking out a Sports Illustrated resort anytime soon.
Ryan Rivett: Probably not. I don't just don't have enough time to keep up with sports, and I'm certainly not the Sports Illustrated guy on a daily basis. I think it's pretty cool though that, uh, that the markets that they're going into and the folks they have on that, like Nashville is such a dynamic market.
It's continued to grow and its offerings. from, you know, country music central now to, uh, having so much more in terms of high-end shopping experiences, luxury, luxury hotels and, and things like that. So, you know, Nashville has been hot for quite a while and adding this new option is gonna be.
It's gonna be great. I know plenty of the people that I go to Nashville with a lot of the times that a lot of the time that we're there is spent looking for a TV to see what's going on. Um, and so, you know, I'm guessing I'll find myself in the Sports Illustrated resort at some point in the future, just, uh, by way of the friends that I keep and the priorities they have.
But a pretty, pretty cool idea. And you know, I think again, it goes, just goes back to the experiences that we can create. We need to continue to grow our the hospitality industry with balance. And that doesn't just mean continuing to create the same product over and over again. you know, yeah.
We need a lot of typical outside hotels or, or urban suburban properties, to satisfy the demand that's out there, especially as we hopefully in the next few years begin to see, our international travel start growing again. Um. But yeah, I, I'm, I'm all for it. I think it's great to have unique options entering the space. And, and again, no differently than the Equinox, concept. I think it expands our purview into what hotels can be and helps us develop things that are scalable inside of, uh, you know, larger, larger growth models and, and, uh, more, more prototypical development. So, I'll be paying attention to that one too. I think it's pretty good.
Steve Carran: David, what about you? 
David Millili: Well, they better have a good bar, that's for sure. Because, you know, if you're gonna put Sports Illustrated on, on a, on a resort or a hotel obviously that component is gonna be really interesting to see what they do that maybe is a little bit unique compared to just kind of every other sports bar.
And I think what it shows is that. We, we've seen it, I think, since we even started doing the podcast is that this evolution of why or how people travel and this idea, you know, we're just covering on it today with micro vacations, adventure travel, luxury sleep, and now kind of a sports themed property. So gonna be interesting to see how these things evolve.
And it'll be interesting too to see if, uh, one of these kinds of newer brands also gets gobbled up by one of the bigger brands. And tries to roll it out in a bigger fashion. But for me, if it's got sports involved, I think I would definitely check it out. well Ryan, let us know what is new with my place hotels.
Ryan Rivett: Well, it's been kind of a rollercoaster ride in our, you know. Say geopolitical and economic landscape the last couple of years. And so I think our developers and operators are continuing to adapt to that. And, and, uh, 24 and 25 have been great years for us in terms of continued unit growth. you know, we had some hurdles and at three that I think we're beyond now. And so it's been an exciting period from the standpoint of the, the real estate development and how that's changed. I think, several years ago we had more individual one property at a time type developers today, continuing to see growth and programmatic and, and institutional based development groups. And so those guys are, are, uh, really moving at a, at a much more quick, much quicker pace. I think, you know, whether it's capitalization is easier or the challenges that come along with development today as compared to what they were, just make it a little bit more prohibitive to, um, a lesser organized or, or substantial development group.
Hopefully we see that come back around again as things. Begin to stabilize over the next few years. But I think from the development side, you know, we're looking at like double digit growth in 2025 in terms of units, which has been fantastic to, uh, be able to look forward to. It's been hard to project the last few years. And the additional stability is great. And, uh, you know, like we're talking earlier in terms of our ability to understand our guests, their reasons for stay, their patterns, their preferences and things. Our Stay rewarded loyalty program has been a huge part of that. We launched it in 2019.
It looks like we're gonna reach about a half a million active members this year, which, um, has been truly rewarding to see how people have latched onto it. And, you know, the focus really isn't necessarily on building big. war chests of points for everybody. What we see is that people are taking advantage of the value, the additional value in the stay rewarded program, much more frequently than letting 'em build up over time.
But also, they like the idea that operators know a little bit better what they're looking for. their ability to put preferences forward inside of their reservations has been something that we've been really well complimented on. So we continue to see that in 2024, we had little over 50% of our reservations were booked through our loyalty program.
As a relatively small player in the franchise, franchise or landscape today, we're pretty proud of that. And so that continued growth mixed with that, that unit growth that we're seeing has been, um, reassuring that we're growing with balance and, um. And some stability. technology's been a big focus of ours.
So here in 25, we've launched a couple of new things. One, our, uh, business intelligence platform called Myre Edge, which is a great opportunity for not only the franchise operator, but the franchisee who's above property generally, you know, a little more disconnected, asset management focused. they're both looking at the same portal every day to understand, you know, statistics on booking stays in revenue from the standpoint of al almost real time. I mean, it updates three or four times throughout the day, so you're seeing and having the ability to make, better decisions both on and above property. That's something we've been working on for the last couple of years here to really refine and get it to where a, it was as close to real time as possible, and b it was easily accessible, from anywhere's, it's Cloud based. And so we have the ability to get to access it without VPN connections and things like that. So, a lot of, it has been, a lot of our focus on technology has been consolidating and simplifying the tools. You guys all understand how a lot of times you have a, a technology piece in the business you're in, regardless of what it is where there.
12 or 14 buttons that you don't need, you know, or, or you gotta click on six different screens to get to what you actually wanted to look at. So we've taken a lot of time to develop that, and refine that. And so I think we're, we're really, really excited about not just the growth that we have, but also we're continuously getting better.
And I think, you know, you can have all the growth that you want, but if you're not progressively getting better at what you do throughout that growth. Becomes two steps forward and one step back. and I think our guests expect a little bit more, I'll say professionalism in the hotel stay, uh, where we've, where we've watched a lot of, a lot of guest preferences during the last.
Several years transition from convenience to quality. They'll go a little farther out of their way to make sure that they have the quality. they've also come and through the review platforms and all of the interactions that we're able to have with them, they've also come through. It said, I really appreciate it when, and usually that includes something about the interaction at the front desk or the interaction, in the room attendants and things like that.
So we've really. Focus a lot on training and trying to get as much consistency and professionalism worked into the, uh, hotel line level employees across our chain as we can. And, um, you know, that's challenging because they're all over the place and there's such diversity and dynamics in that, in that, uh, cross section of our teams that, um, you've really gotta learn before you can teach and the learning is dynamic.
So figuring out how to standardize and stabilize the communications from those of us who are on the front end of developing platforms to those people who are on, on the front line of, of executing on those is something that we've put a heavy focus on in, in 24 and 25 particularly. And, uh, you know, I'm, I'm kind of excited to see how that'll pay dividends in the next year.
But, you know, otherwise it's, uh, it's business as usual. We've had, uh, we've had a pretty good. Pretty good first half of the year and, um, fingers crossed it'll continue on that path. So we're pretty happy.
David Millili: So let people know, Ryan, how they can get in touch with you or how they can find out more about my place hotels.
Ryan Rivett: So, easiest and quickest way is to check out my place hotels.com. You'll find all the information you need there for a Stay Rewarded program, uh, or to book a hotel room or both, or check out the franchising tab and, uh. Read a little bit about our story, what's going on here, and give us a call, you'll find all the phone numbers and email addresses to reach out to us that you need there. Social media, again, everybody's got that, but Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, just search my place and you'll find us.
David Millili: That's great. So that does it for another episode of The Modern Hotelier, the Most engaged podcast in hospitality. This has been a hot hospitality, hot topics episode, whether you're watching or listening. We appreciate you and hope to be with you again soon.
Thank you, Ryan. Appreciate it.
Ryan Rivett: Thank you for having me.