Pendry Hotels & Resorts Is On A Tear. Can Anything Stop This Upstart “New Luxury” Brand?
Unless you’re flush with someone else’s money, rapid scaling in almost any business usually means that you’re onto something.
In the luxury hotel space, however, scaling a brand as a practical, physical matter isn’t as easy as just running some cheeky Instagram campaign and poaching a new tranche of subscribers. In addition to deep capital pockets (think hundreds of millions of dollars), developing a hotel requires big land buys, zoning, permits, programming, design, staffing, training, and of course the actual building of buildings—which in the case of a high-end, architecturally-significant resort or hotel can take years to complete even if the local community is behind you and supply bottlenecks don’t choke you.
Tastes and market shifts—as well as pandemics—can also catch up with you in the meantime. What was in vogue three years ago can just as quickly fall out of favor. And in the case of COVID-19, locations that once seemed cherry can unexpectedly whither and turtle what once seemed like a surefire real estate investment upside down.
All of which means that a lucid plan and a definable brand when it comes to a luxury hotel’s essential identity are vital to staying on the throttle when the road ahead opens up.
