“Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans,” sings John Lennon in one of his beautiful post-Beatles songs.
And in the world of hotel asset management, no matter what your best-laid plans are, staying attuned to unexpected opportunities can bring real rewards.
Hussein Sunderji, a managing director and partner at EQ Hotels, has a name for this knack – he calls it “optionality” - and it helped his company to the finals of this year’s HAMA Europe Asset Management Achievement Award, co-sponsored by Questex Hospitality and HotStats.
When EQ Hotels acquired the Novotel London West, a large conference and exhibition hotel in Hammersmith, their original business plan came straight out of the value-add textbook: apply a premium brand, invest in a full renovation, lift operations, and sell the asset at a healthy profit five years later.
But, as Sunderji tells the story, this is not what happened.
Portfolio deal
To fill in the background, the acquisition of Novotel London West was part of “a pretty complex transaction that we carried out in May of 2024 with our capital partner Ares Real Estate.”
EQ Hotels and Ares bought the freeholds of 21 hotels from Land Securities for £400m, plus the leasehold and management interests from AccorInvest (now Essendi) and Accor.
The highest value property in the portfolio was the Novotel London West. “Immediately we were drawn to this asset because of its scale: 630 rooms and nearly 5,000 square metres of meeting space,” said Sunderji.
As the fourth largest conference and exhibition hotel in London, Sunderji knew that its larger competitors commanded significantly higher ADR premiums, so there was a clear commercial opportunity to optimise performance at the Hammersmith property.
EQ Hotels is a vertically integrated hotel operating platform that engages in the acquisition, development and management of hotel assets.
The group already had an impressive track record in acquiring and managing some of the largest conference and exhibition hotels in the UK and elsewhere, including the Hilton London Metropole (1,100 bedrooms), Hilton Birmingham Metropole (790 bedrooms), and Le Meridien Etoile in Paris (1,025 bedrooms).
“These types of hotels are not commonly found across Europe. And to build these hotels today does not make any sense, given the financing environment and build costs,” he commented.
The plan
Sunderji and his team could clearly see the upside from re-positioning the Novotel London West when they embarked on their plan, which consisted of three key areas.
“One was institutionalizing the asset, so getting rid of all the broken technology that was there, putting in place systems that would align with our way of driving performance, flipping to franchise, and establishing an SPV,” he explained.
The second area of work was optimising the P&L, driving RevPAR growth, and looking at ways to reduce expenses and payroll.
The third component was capex. EQ Hotels had a budget of £80m to renovate the hotel. “At acquisition, we had a full team of interior designers, planning consultants, and engineers to fully scope the plan,” he said. The plans included the possibility of adding another 174 keys to the existing 630 bedrooms.
“We didn't want to commit to a brand quite yet, so we designed the renovation in parallel while talking to the brands, which we whittled down to a shortlist of Hyatt, Marriott, and Pullman,” he said. “We wanted to leave that optionality open until we were ready to start on site.”
New designs
Three new prototype rooms were built, as well as designs for new public areas, a statement bar, and co-working spaces. EQ Hotels was in the middle of a full tender process with general contractors to start the building work.
However, something unexpected was happening simultaneously.
“We started having off market conversations with Surinder Arora from the Arora Group in July 2025 and, after ten weeks of exclusivity, we sold the Novotel London West,” said Sunderji.
So, instead of five years, EQ Hotels only owned and managed the hotel for 16 months. Within that shortened timeframe, EQ Hotels succeeded in increasing RevPAR by 16 percent compared to just 0.7 percent for the hotel’s competitor set, and boosting NOI 49 percent, according to Sunderji.
“Driving profitability so quickly created the conditions for a quick and opportunistic exit,” he said. “Effectively, the key was our flexible branding strategy and maintaining optionality. We know how important optionality is in our world of asset management, and for exits.”
Instead of expecting to achieve a 9.2 percent yield after five years of management and £80m capex on renovations, EQ Hotels achieved a 10 percent yield on cost without ever spending anything on the renovations work.
The standout RevPAR increase was achieved by “starting with a blank piece of paper and asking: ‘what is our optimal business mix?’ and then deciding what revenue, sales and marketing strategies we needed to change who we have in the building at certain times of the year,” he explained.
In recent years, policy-driven headwinds in the UK market have made payroll costs very challenging for hospitality operators. Inflation, changes to national insurance contributions and the National Minimum Wage have all had an impact which meant that Sunderji was expecting to see a seven or eight percentage increase in payroll at Novotel London West after the acquisition. Instead, EQ Hotels actually reduced payroll by 12.2 percent.
How? “Look, we don't believe in cutting costs to the bone,” he explained. “We believe in the virtuous cycle of value creation. Start with the guest, take care of the guests, and incentivise your team members to do that.”
In addition, EQ Hotels deployed artificial intelligence (AI) tools to “automate the back end”, which helped to rationalise expenses.
Value creation
“We also increased the Novotel London West’s scores on Booking.com, TripAdvisor, and Google, all at the exact same time, and that combination of reducing the cost base and growing the revenue gave us that 49% increase in profitability,” he said.
In summary, Sunderji remarked: “We ended up condensing a five-year business plan into a 16-month period. It wasn’t the same plan, obviously, but the three mock-up rooms - that could either be a Hyatt, Marriott or a Pullman - and the opportunity to add another 174 keys, are all in the plans we handed over to Arora Group, providing those value creation options to them during their ownership.”
All quotes taken from the HAMA Europe Asset Management Achievement Award 2026 held in Berlin during IHIF EMEA.