NEW YORK— With the divestment of its Baymont Inn and Suites division and the segue of La Quinta President/Chief Development Officer Alan Tallis to a consultant’s role within the Blackstone Group affiliate-owned hotel chain, La Quinta, nonetheless, will remain aggressive in its expansion plans, according to its President/CEO, Wayne Goldberg. “I see us as a very focused growth company. We’re positioning the company to continue extreme growth, both on the corporate side and on the franchise side. We want to have a very strong development program where we’re growing our owned and operated assets at the same time we have an aggressive plan to continue our franchise program,” said the executive. Goldberg indicated La Quinta benefits by the decision to sell the Baymont brand and franchising system. (When selling the Baymont chain to Cendant Hotel Group, Blackstone retained 65 corporate-owned properties in order to convert them to La Quinta products.) “It really does make a lot of sense: it makes economic sense; it makes operations sense. We have now created an environment where we have one very strong brand that we’re able to focus on and not have to worry if a decision we’re making is dilutive to one brand, accretive to one brand,” he said, noting of the two, La Quinta was the stronger brand “in every measure.” Following Blackstone’s acquisition of the two brands earlier this year, there had been aspirations to double the size of the La Quinta portfolio over a two- to three-year period. “We really are not limited from a capital standpoint, although the key there is doing good deals, doing the right deals. We do have a very strong pipeline, both on the franchise side and the corporate side,” said Goldberg, adding the latter has in total “well over 100 hotels at all different stages.” At press time there were 550 hotels, including 167 franchised hotels. There are 145 approved properties in the franchise pipeline that are slated to open over the next 24 months. The executive said evp/development and acquisitions Temple Weiss would continue to head development for the corporate hotels, leading a team of “acquisition specialists” formed during the winter. “We’re reviewing a lot of deals. There’s a lot of opportunities on one-off deals, small portfolios, groups of hotels that we’re looking at,” said Goldberg. “We’re looking in a lot of areas in different parts of the country where we don’t have much distribution today; the Baymont decision has helped us there….we actually enhanced our distribution in the Northeast and we also grew the brand by approximately 16 percent by converting the corporate Baymonts.” Franchisees electing to divest their properties also have been given the opportunity to present them for sale first to the corporation. Goldberg said one property in Anaheim, CA, was acquired in the spring this way. “You can’t make a more natural conversion than taking a property that’s flying your flag and just changing the ownership,” laughed Goldberg. Rajiv Trivedi, evp/franchising, has been working on such aspects of the evolving chain, with current responsibilities for the entire franchise operation and sales organization. He anticipated adding approximately 50 franchise properties by year’s end, although he stressed, “We have not set numbers in stone…we are also aggressively pursuing acquisitions.” With fewer executive layers and Trivedi a direct report, Goldberg said “we’ll be a lot more efficient, we’ll be a lot more productive, and we’ll be very nimble and be able to make decisions very, very quickly because we won’t be bogged down in process.” Trivedi will be the signatory for La Quinta Franchising LLC. Tallis was president of this LLC, as well as LQ Management, LLC and Baymont Franchising. Trivedi is currently evp/franchising within LQ Management, LLC and La Quinta Franchising LLC. Although Tallis will be on hand as a senior advisor, Trivedi said it was “still a surprise” that the industry veteran decided
