Jay Pecotte, senior director of project development of Hard Rock Hotels and Casinos, took some time to speak to LODGING about how the brand as adapted to the changing hospitality marketplace, as well as the massive growth opportunities it is pursuing around the world.
When you open up a hotel overseas, how much memorabilia from the local culture do you incorporate? All of our hotels are unique to their locations, so there’s not a cookie cutter model to the Hard Rock brand. There is a performance standard, but when we go in, we usually take a deep look at the property both for efficacy and to see what’s missing in the market, then we try to add those missing attributes into our hotel. The properties we’re working on in Colombia are a good example of what we are trying to do—updating each hotel based on the trends of the area. Beer gardens are big down there, and craft beer, which you wouldn’t think would be a big deal in Bogota, Columbia, is huge. So then with the memorabilia, we ask our developers and designers what their interests are and aren’t. They usually give us a list of who they would like to see or what makes sense in that market. To continue with the Colombia example, Santana was big down there, so we tried to gravitate toward Santana and that part of the culture.
How do you get an idea for the themes you want to pursue in each property? We do our research. We do studies that tell us about the location and its comp set. Then we go in with our great team of memorabilia designers and we can end up integrating all of our memorabilia and art. We do a really good job telling a story with local memorabilia and media, but there is also always going to be a place for classic favorites like Elvis, Madonna, Michael Jackson, and big hair Bon Jovi. Our visitors are from all over the world, and if we didn’t incorporate the classics along with the local flavor, the hotel wouldn’t feel very Hard Rock.
The Hard Rock brand has been around for a long time. How has it adapted to the current hotel marketplace? We have a focus on the overall thrill of the Hard Rock experience, which I think is timeless, so that aids our longevity. And, at the same time, we are very invested in expanding our reach. The Seminal tribe owns some of Hard Rock and they really want to grow the brand. They love the brand they have been very successful in their Tampa and Hollywood properties, which are both expanding to about a thousand rooms. We just signed a New York deal, so we’ll be opening a property in New York in the next couple of years, which is very exciting. My territory is the Americas, so recently we started branching out in Brazil. Bogota is something we are actively working on, so we are branching out aggressively in South America.
What are the opportunities like for Hard Rock in South America right now? We’re seeing that many South American countries are having money coming in from their neighbors when there wasn’t any before. Peru has a lot of money coming in from its neighboring countries right now. Brazil, which I think of as its own little snow globe, is more inner-focused, where a lot of these other countries are outward-focused. I just met a few guys from Ecuador last night that are really excited about the Hard Rock brand, so I think we can get something going there, its just building those relationships. Costa Rica is another place where we have a couple of deals to consider. I think that the overall South American lodging climate is good right now, so we’ll see. Hopefully as we go forward, we will have 100 hotels open by 2020. We have a little more than 20 open right now.
This is a huge growth spurt. How are you making sure you do it right? You’re right, it is huge. We don’t want the growth to be so big that it hinders us, because these properties are personal to us and they are unique to the location. It’d be easier if we had a standard format, but we don’t and that’s what helps make every property special. The environments we create are very immersive and very personal, and our team is always in a new property helping to curate the art, finalize the design, all of those details, and the results are always beyond our expectations. We love it so much and if we didn’t love it, we wouldn’t work so hard to get it right.
