Between June 2- 4, senior representatives from across the hospitality industry will head to the Marriott Marquis in New York City for the 46th annual NYU International Hospitality Industry Investment Conference.
This year’s speakers include: the CEOs of Marriott, Hilton and IHG as well as David Solomon, the CEO of Goldman Sachs and Jon Gray, chief operating officer, at Blackstone.
Not only will you hear from leading hotel investment executives, but the multiple networking opportunities mean you’ll be able to capitalise on the return to dealmaking we are seeing this year.
There's still time to get yourself a ticket, by registering here.
Ahead of his appearance at the event we are re-running an interview we conducted with Tyler Morse, CEO of MCR Hotels.
Tyler Morse is just trying to have some fun.
The lively chief executive and founder of MCR Hotels, a top three owner-operator of hotels in the U.S., relishes peculiar opportunities. He also enjoys a good font – Calibri, in fact — and delights in a game of Jenga, an interesting wrinkle for a man whose job requires him to both raze and build structures.
Morse, a native of Los Angeles and the son of a corporate lawyer and travel agent, enjoys the little things about his job, telling Hospitality Investor, “If you’re not having fun, why bother?”
Fun certainly seems to be in his and, by extension, his company’s DNA. MCR is well known for unique projects, such as the High Line Hotel in Manhattan or the popular, award-winning TWA Hotel at John F. Kennedy International Airport in Queens, which honors vintage air travel and lodging and the historic Trans World Airlines through a mid-20th century aesthetic in a redeveloped TWA terminal. The High Line Hotel project, in particular, was realized via an adaptive reuse of an Episcopalian seminary in Manhattan.
MCR’s arrival on the national hotel scene was many years in the making, but its reputation has accelerated considerably since global shutdowns in the spring of 2020, as the company has found opportunities to capitalize on market dislocations.
Strategic bets
In recent years, Morse has talked often about market distress and having the instinct and courage to make strategic bets when opportunities arise, when there’s “blood in the streets,” he said.
“That's when you want to be buying. You saw the same thing in 2001 and in 2009. There was a lot of fear [after COVID] that it's different this time; it's a paradigm shift; we're all going to be locked down forever,” Morse said. “We [at MCR] fundamentally believed in a return to the mean. You know, the world generally reverts to the way it was before. Human beings don't change because of these exogenous events. Human psychology does not change. We believed in the world coming back, and we were willing to invest by that.”
The Sheraton New York Times Square is an example of MCR striking while the iron was hot. The hotel was one with which Morse was familiar, having dealt with the asset in his early days in the industry working under Barry Sternlicht at Starwood Hotels & Resorts.
One of the largest hotels in New York — comprising nearly 1,800 rooms — the Sheraton New York had last traded in 2006, the same year Morse launched his company by building extended-stay hotels in secondary and tertiary markets in the southeast and renting out rooms for $199 a week. MCR nabbed it for $356 million, which was nearly half what it sold for 16 years earlier.
That transaction was one of 70 hotel acquisitions that MCR closed in the two years after the onset of the pandemic, together with its investments in two proptech companies. Overall, the company locked up around $2 billion worth of investments and put more than $500 million of equity to work in the market from 2020 through 2022, according to MCR.
“Fun” is reflected in the way Morse talks about and approaches his role and business activities, and it is brought to life in his company’s portfolio. Look no further than the historic Gramercy Park Hotel, a New York jewel that closed down in 2020 and had been mired in various legal disputes ever since; MCR bought the Gramercy Park Hotel leasehold interest for just $50 million last August and it has launched a mission to polish and restore the rough diamond by 2025.
“We're investing a ton of money in the renovation of the building and bringing it up to five-star standards,” Morse said. “It's a huge room product; they're great rooms. The hotel guests will have keys to Gramercy Park to be able to use if you stay in the hotel. We have a number of food and beverage spaces and speakeasy club spaces. It's really a terrific asset. We're excited to manage it back to life.
“It’s very early days, and we’re in the planning process right now,” Morse added.
Transatlantic transactions
More recently, MCR went abroad to add another jewel to its pouch. The company announced last month that it had acquired a landmark and key piece of London’s skyline in the BT Tower, a 620-foot skyscraper that traded for 275 million pounds. MCR will transition the former telecommunications tower into a hotel, opening it to the public full-time.
“I do really enjoy the unique projects that become part of the cultural zeitgeist,” Morse said. “I try to do one of them at a time. I've got a couple in the pipeline for after Gramercy. Those always play well, you know, and I think they're really understated sometimes, those unique properties; they're the fun ones.
“I think that that's what people love,” Morse added. “We all stay in hotels for a business trip or something like that, but when you go to a place because you want to be there and you choose it because it's fun, it's unique, it's different, and it appeals to you. There's something about a hotel that speaks to you.”
The TWA Hotel has served as a staging ground for various cultural activities. Last month, The Fest for Beatles Fans was held there over a three-day period, commemorating Beatlemania and the legacy of the iconic 1960s band.
The hotel also played host to the National Blocking Association’s first Jenga Tournament in February 2023, attracting hundreds of competitors for a chance at a $10,000 grand prize. One such attendee was Robert “Mr. Jenga” Grebler, the man who acquired exclusive rights to the game in the U.S. and Canada in the mid-1980s, bringing it to toy stores across North America. A few months later in June 2023, another MCR hotel, the Sheraton New York, hosted the organization’s second Jenga tournament in the city.
Morse is the chairman of the National Blocking Association, which was formed to bring people together and draw attention to the popular table-top game created by Tanzanian-born British game designer Leslie Scott.
MCR has done a lot of work around intellectual property, and the National Blocking Association is one piece of that.
His company is somewhat of a regular of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. A few years ago, MCR trademarked the phrase “Experiential Hotels,” which it has honored with quirky perks and experiences at its hotels — such as an in-house pumpkin carver and a magician and cruciverbalist at the Highline Hotel or actors dressed in vintage air travel garb in the TWA Hotel.
MCR is also in the process of putting a stamp on the reservation of the term “RevCAR,” which is a parking statistic they’ve developed that Morse said stands for “revenue per car.” He said they use it internally and are currently working on a couple products to launch and go wider with “RevCAR.”
“We own about a dozen [trademarks],” Morse said. “Some are fairly technical.”
Font times
One accompanying story that ran alongside the construction and opening of the TWA Hotel several years ago was MCR’s development of a new font that pays homage to the work of renowned architect and designer Eero Saarinen, who designed the original TWA Flight Center terminal and inspired the airline’s iconic typeface that it used starting in 1959 after the terminal opened.
“I’m really into fonts,” Morse quipped. “If you haven’t seen the movie ‘Helvetica,’ I highly recommend it.”
“The font for the TWA… that was hand drawn by Eero Saarinen in the corner of one of his architectural drawings,” Morse added. His team loved it so much that Morse had it digitized. It’s called “Flight Center Gothic.”
“I’m trying to get it in Google Fonts right now,” Morse said, adding that the internet search giant has more than 900 fonts. “When you get a font on Google Fonts, that’s when you know you’ve arrived.”
When asked whether there was any money to be made from getting the new font into Google’s database, Morse said, “no, nothing, you have to give it to Google for free, but you know, why do people climb mountains?” (Morse has, indeed, climbed a mountain—Mount Kilimanjaro.)
Morse’s ascendance in the lodging world has been nothing short of mountainous. He has gone from assembling ground-up ValuePlace-branded (now called WoodSpring Suites) extended-stay hotels in places like Lexington, Ky. and Kalamazoo, Mich. to being the largest hotel owner in New York, the most prolific real estate market in the world.
Now, as Morse closes in on two decades since founding MCR, he’s got 150 hotels, more than 25,000 rooms, investments in several proptech firms and over $5 billion in assets under management.
Jenga was derived from the Swahili word kujenga, which means “to build.” It seems as though Morse wants to continue having a blast doing just that.