Ben Weprin, founder of Graduate Hotels, discusses the seasonality and demand drivers of boutique hotels in collegiate markets.
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Weprin: Success comes down to who can 'eat the most shit'
“All the most successful people that I've, you know, read about or met, it's like, who can, you know, eat the most shit and just keep going forward?”
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Weprin: Recessions create major opportunities for luxury hotel brands
“I also think there's a huge opportunity for this brand in a recession to actually, you know, acquire assets, or to, you know, build the portfolio of operational, because they're, you know, these smaller hotels, if they're in trouble, they could use distributio…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Weprin: No hotel brand existed around university nostalgia before Graduate Hotels
“It's the idea that people take very passionate ownership of where they went to school or where they're from, and the hotel product was terrible, and no one had done it. I was like, why anybody done it? Why hadn't somebody built a brand? There's all these brand…”
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Weprin: Ideas that are easy to say but hard to execute win
“Easy to say, hard to do, but that's actually a great recipe for a new business too.”
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Weprin: Scaling hospitality requires thinking smaller to evoke local nostalgia
“The challenge as you grew bigger was to think smaller and find more stories and more history and more nostalgia and create, you know, we get this term nostalgia. You create a new memory in an old place that you'd already been that felt familiar.”
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
Weprin: Graduate Hotels laid off 2,000 of 2,200 employees during COVID
“Yeah, corporate, we had a lot of layoffs. The property levels, we had a massive amount of layoffs. I think we laid off 2000 people out of the, I think, 2200 at the time.”