Auberge Resorts Collection CEO Craig Reid said he feels bruised by the year that just ended. He lost a very close friend, as well as an amazing hotel in Calistoga Ranch in Napa Valley, California, that burned to the ground in September during the region’s Glass Fire.
Of course, more than anything he has had to deal with the ebb and flow and all of the painful decisions associated with the coronavirus. But Reid unequivocally added that he hasn’t allowed the hurt of the year to take away from his sense of where he and Auberge are heading.
The Mill Valley, California-based boutique luxury brand known for its resorts and heartfelt service captured a 30% increase in marketshare during the more buoyant summer and fall months of 2020, according to Reid. Six properties are set to open in 2021, adding to the 20-hotel, mostly domestic U.S. portfolio.
Since joining the group in January 2014 after a 30-year career with Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, Reid, working under the ownership of Houston-based automobile distribution tycoon Dan Friedkin, has been able to write his own chapter at Auberge. He is taking some of the many learnings from Four Seasons legend Issy Sharpe to create hotels that he said have deeper sincerity to their locales, are more intimate, more colorful and expressive of the environment.
An avid sportsman with a “let’s go beat ‘em” mentality, Reid said today he is acting as more of a facilitator and teacher for the mix of artisans and veteran hoteliers on the team, pushing decision-making further down the command chain as opposed to acting as a patriarchal CEO.
To match the company’s ethos, he wants the artisans to have a louder voice than the traditional hotelkeepers.
“What you don’t want to do is drown the creative voices,” Reid said. “Our hotels have to be very expressive. They must have more of a theatrical approach to the delivery of service, and the more you institutionalize, the more you suffocate that.”
The 60-year-old Reid, who was born in Peru, went to high school in the U.K. and moved to the U.S. after college, has been working out of his Dallas home since last spring. The crisis has afforded him more time take neighborhood walks with his wife, Marybeth, and dote on his grandchildren. But he has also been venturing out to spend time with his teams and oversee development projects.
“I was actually comfortable with the idea of flying all along, but some of my colleagues were not,” Reid said. “Rather than tell people what to do I just jumped into my car and drove across the country, twice, to underscore the fact that where there is a will, there is a way.”
Early beneficiaries
The new year will be a breakout one for Auberge, opening six hopefully well-timed properties, which has also allowed Reid to keep his leadership team intact during the downturn. A mix of new-builds and conversions include Bishop’s Lodge in Santa Fe, New Mexico, scheduled to open this spring; Stanly Ranch in Napa Valley, California, opens this summer; The Inn at Mattei’s Tavern, in Los Olivos, California (outside Santa Barbara) will open in the autumn, as will Etéreo in Riviera Maya, Mexico, and Hacienda AltaGracia in San Ysidro, Costa Rica. This winter, Susurros del Corazón is set to open in Punta de Mita, Mexico.
Reid said the group will soon announce new developments in San Francisco, South Carolina, the Hudson Valley in New York, as well as second and third properties in Europe, including Italy. Africa is also on Auberge’s radar. The bigger objective is for Auberge to exceed 40 properties in the next five years, with growing emphasis on urban, club-like properties, which would potentially make it the largest boutique luxury operator in the world.
The most recent opening was the 50-room Commodore Perry in Austin, Texas, which Reid said has a 400% RevPAR index and gives some initial credence to Auberge’s urban aspirations.
Bigger picture, Reid believes Auberge can match 2019 revenue numbers by Q4 2021 and thinks 2022 will exceed 2019 performance.
“We’re predominantly resort, domestic, small and outdoorsy,” Reid said. “Group will be slower to manifest itself, or group like we knew it… Of people wanting to rent a residence in Cabo or Telluride next summer, I think they are desperate to do that and will do that. We will be the early beneficiaries.”
Internal rallies
Early on during the COVID crisis, Reid reached out to his team to create strategies that would help the company emerge stronger than ever and create an even deeper commitment. Among the new plans: introduce a new orientation program. There’s going to be no message from the CEO; it’s going to come from colleagues to help create a greater sense of community.
To keep better tabs on everyone’s well-being, Monday “Weekly Rally” calls that used to be more about sharing what owners were visiting that week, what openings were upcoming, and issues of the moment are now more about everybody sharing stories about their lives.
“I’ve been out there worried about all my team members who maybe live alone,” Reid said. “My assistant Frances, who’s brilliant, lives by herself in Marin County (near the corporate office). Her work colleagues were very much an extension of her family and when we said we were going to shut down the office, it was a shock to her. So, we’ve all tried to monitor who needs a little bit more TLC and feel more of a community.”
Because those casual, idea-generating meetings around the coffee machine have disappeared, Reid is also scheduling small off-site gatherings to brainstorm. One is coming up this month at the Chileno Bay property in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. About 12 leaders will gather mostly outdoors for “what do you think about this idea” sessions. “That’s the one piece I feel has been missing from our repertoire in terms of frequency,” Reid added.
And once COVID is under control and gathering safely is more acceptable, he wants to have a leadership conference, ideally at the new property in Santa Fe. “I think that a celebration of being together and surviving this is going to be extremely important.”
Doing the right thing by team members, and not just senior management but anyone who plays an important role, is the key to success, Reid said.
“Do the right thing. Be seen to be doing the right thing because it’s become easy to find people. The issue is not finding people, the issue is getting people to blossom, and you’ve got to do the right thing… They judge, we’re judged every single day by our actions. And in all this distraction or scrambling, recalibrating, it all starts with taking care of the rank and file. For these companies that have had to cull 40% of the people, you’ve got to reinvest in creating a sense of confidence and explain why it was a one-time phenomenon versus a way of doing business.”
The heartfelt piece
As for how Auberge treats its guests going forward in a COVID-informed world, Reid believes that sincerity in service is critical. “What you don’t want is to be seen as doing it because it’s fashionable. People will see right through the lack of sincerity,” he said.
To that end, Auberge has an internal acronym, ENRICH, to get teams excited about their roles. The “E” stands for excellence and the “H” is for heartfelt. “I felt right at the beginning that it was important to start with an E – that we’re in the business of creating excellence,” Reid said. “And yet I think what the team needed more than anything else is the sense of the heartfelt approach to everything we do. And I would say today that the balance is going back to heartfelt. Our guests, when they stay at the hotel, they pick up on that, that heartfelt piece.”
For example, to convey even a bit of sincerity today, when cars arrive at the entrance to Auberge properties, staff members will quickly drop their mask, smile and say welcome before guests exit their vehicles. Simple but effective today.
Auberge also is not marketing its sanitation programming as Reid feels it doesn’t resonate enough with their customers and should be perceived as a given.
“We spent a lot of time coaching the team on the whole idea of asking the guests what they would prefer,” he said. “Having said that, we wanted to make sure that we didn’t put employees in harm’s way. So, we asked our employees to sign off on the level of sanitation and the protocols that they were going to observe. There is a lot of hand washing, sanitation stations everywhere and very strict adherence to mask wearing – even during breaks.”
But as it pertains to the guests, Auberge leadership doesn’t want them to feel as though they are staying in a hospital-type environment. “We want them to feel that they’re in a country home,” Reid said. “We’re able to set up vignettes. But it’s interesting because we came up with tables for two in the woods, or the option of sitting on the deck amongst all the other tables. Guess where most people wanted to be? They wanted to be on the deck. They wanted a bit of a social vibrancy, but they wanted it to be very spaced.”
Seeding the future
Looking ahead, Reid said he is very optimistic about Auberge’s position in the market because of the growing demand for bespoke services.
He is also at a stage in his career where he is more focused on growing his team and preparing Auberge for its next generation of leadership.
“In fact, one of the things Dan [Friedkin] said is ‘build this company for my children.’ I met his kids and they were all in their 20s, and now their 20s and 30s. And one of the things I did is seed the company with very senior executives in their 30s, as well as a couple of us who are longer in the tooth, had gone through a crisis or two. It’s all been very, very gratifying.”
It’s been so gratifying that as Reid stops to reflect, he said, “I equate it to having spent all my life driving Mercedes sedans and now I have a little convertible, a Morgan Roadster, and I’m on the island of Capri.”