James Carroll, the president and CEO of Crestline Hotels & Resorts, is quick to remind visitors to his Fairfax, Va., office that the model planes on his bookshelf are not toys, but replicas. It’s a fine distinction and one the former naval aviator takes seriously, having flown F/A-18 Hornets in his time after graduating from the U.S. Naval Academy. Among the replicas are red-and-white banded models, training planes, as Carroll points out, that sit beside the F18s Carroll and his fellow flyboys graduated to. Running hotels is not dogfighting, but the symbolism isn’t lost: Crestline is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year and, having shed its training wings long ago, is jetting forward on a mission to be at the top of all third-party management companies in the U.S.
It starts at the top—and that’s Carroll, who joined Crestline in 2004 and was promoted to president and CEO six years later. Crestline, in a roundabout way, is a spawn of Marriott. In the early 1990s, Marriott spun off its owned real estate, creating an OpCo and PropCo bifurcation, with Host Marriott retaining Marriott’s lodging real estate and other concessions business, while Marriott International took over management duties. One of the people who worked on the split was Bruce Wardinski, who, after Host reclassified as a REIT, helped spin off and lead Crestline Capital, which took with it Host’s non-essential real estate holdings. Around 2000, Crestline reshuffled its asset mix and started reinvesting in hotels, with Wardinski also deciding to manage them. Crestline Hotels & Resorts was born. In 2002, Spain’s Barcelo Hotels & Resorts acquired Crestline Capital, sold 60% of it four years later before reacquiring it in 2017.
“We joke with Marriott folks that we are like their grandchild,” Carroll said. What started with around 20 hotels in 2000 has blossomed into a portfolio of more than 120 that run the gamut from full service to select service, branded and independent. In the past year alone, Crestline has added a dozen hotels, the majority of which are in the lifestyle, soft-brand categories.
Two Customers
Third-party operators like Crestline play a critical role not only in managing hotels on a day-to-day basis. They satisfy two very important stakeholders in the asset hierarchy: owners and brands. They may not be pure go-betweens, but they sure have a responsibility to both. “At the end of the day, the owner is most important,” Carroll said. “But if I want to be of value to the owner, I need to have a very strong relationship with the brand. Owners look for us to balance their needs with the needs of the brand.”
One of Crestline’s biggest, most important clients is Apple Hospitality REIT, one of the largest owners of select-service properties in the country. Crestline manages around 25 of its hotels. Justin Knight, CEO and director of Apple Hospitality REIT, lauded Crestline for its ability to deliver strong results. “Crestline’s leadership understands and anticipates market trends while employing operational practices customized for each property,” he said. “We have enjoyed mutual respect and a shared vision of success.”
Carroll also notes that brands have become more in tune with owner profitability, something that had its roots during the pandemic and has carried over as impacts from tariffs and interest rates make it more difficult to eke out profit. “The brands have been more flexible. They understand the profitability pressures. If an owner can’t make a branded hotel profitable, they’re not going to brand it,” Carroll said.
Carroll tries to sidestep the notion that his naval background doesn’t inform his leadership style and maneuvering of the company. But it’s inescapable. “There are no points for second place,” he said, literally invoking a famous line from arguably the greatest fighter-pilot movie ever, “Top Gun.”
“My edge is always: We have to win; whatever it takes. If you’re second, you’re losing,” he said. “A culture of mediocrity isn’t good enough; maintaining market share isn’t good enough; you need to be growing market share, be number one in your market and hold that position.”
How it accomplishes that coveted position is a function of on-site operations and corporate strategy. Drawing from his fighter-pilot past, Carroll employs debriefings to assess both successes and hiccups. “You have very thorough briefs where you go into a mission and when you’re done, no matter how well or poorly it went, everybody gets in a room to debrief,” he said. Rank is insignificant in these sessions. “If you messed up, you should expect to hear from everybody else in the room,” Carroll said.
One of Carroll’s reports, whose mistakes are few, is EVP of Operations Aaron Olson, now eight years with Crestline. One of the things he is most proud of at Crestline is its low rate of churn, a continuity that is sometimes lacking in the traditionally peripatetic hospitality industry. In the years Olson has been with Crestline, he hasn’t lost one regional VP. One of his main focuses is food and beverage, so much so that Crestline is in the process of hiring a VP of F&B, explicitly with a lifestyle background, a segment where Olson believes hotels can truly be inventive.
“F&B is moving away from traditional banquets and catering being the largest component,” Olson said. “We’re seeing restaurants and bars becoming much more important, driven by the rise of lifestyle and soft-brand hotels,” which Crestline is heavily involved in. For instance, it manages The Delphi in Los Angeles, the former Standard hotel. Other lifestyle, independent hotels in its portfolio include The Chemists’ Club in New York and Waldorf Towers in Miami. It also manages hotels under Hilton’s Curio and Tapestry Collections and Choice Hotels’ Ascend Hotel Collection.
Generating Growth
Third-party management companies—the good management companies—make hay amid a robust transaction market. Often, when an asset changes hands, a new operator is brought in. The problem is, as Carroll pointed out, “The transaction market is crawling.” He’s not wrong: According to JLL, global hotel transaction volume in the first half of 2025 reached $24.5 billion, down 17.5% versus 2024. Still, Crestline has added a dozen hotels in the past year.
One of the reasons the third-party management model continues to thrive is born out of hotel brands progressively exiting the management game to focus explicitly on generating fees through franchising. “I don’t think the brands see the value in managing, especially the smaller hotels,” Carroll said. “When companies specialize in one aspect of the business, they can do that more efficiently than somebody who is trying to be an owner and an operator. The owners see that and would rather have the brand be focused on what they’re best at, which is the franchise model, the branding, the marketing, the loyalty programs they are driving.”
No matter how the model evolves, prosperity as a management company comes down to one thing: driving strong performance. “If we are successful, owners will keep hiring us,” Carroll said. And it’s not because Crestline negotiates management contracts that favor owners on the fee side—it’s quite the opposite. “I could run Crestline more profitably. And if I had market pressure, maybe I would have to. But my pressure from my owner is to grow smart and long term,” Carroll said. For example, Crestline maintains a heavy regional team, one where turnover is low, but, in turn, it reduces margins and overall profitability. It’s also tripled the number of people on its digital team in the last 24 months. Crestline also invests a lot of its own money in technology and systems “that we then can put in front of the owners and make our team perform better,” Carroll said.
And really that’s what it comes down to: operating hotels to their fullest, taking care of guests, making money for owners. Sounds simple, but it’s not. Even though Crestline has been at it for a quarter of a century, learning and getting better are constant. When Carroll finished flight training, he got his wings; he was a pilot. But now, he said, “You have to go learn your plane.”
Like anything, no craft is mastered on the first day. It takes repetition and practice. And that’s what keeps Crestline going.