When he was growing up, Justin Jabara spent weekends and summers behind the front desk of his family’s hotels, whether that was in the kitchen helping the chefs prepare dinner at the hotel restaurants, in the DJ booth at the hotel nightclubs or in the company of the hotel housekeeping staff if his father had a meeting. “This is how I grew up. When we traveled, we didn’t go on family vacations; we went to our hotels. We didn’t go to camp; we went to our hotels. We didn’t have a normal childhood in that fashion, but it was normal to us and we loved it,” said Jabara, now president of Meyer Jabara Hotels.
Where It All Began
It all started when his grandfather, Ted Jabara, a traveling linens salesman, would sell high-end linens to hotels, going back and forth with his family between Brooklyn to Miami. He came across a half-built hotel in South Carolina along what would soon become I-95 and, along with Arthur Meyer, bought the hotel from the bank, finished building it, and it became their first hotel—a Holiday Inn. That was in 1969 and was the start of Servico. “That proved to be very successful for them," Jabara said. "They started buying land where they thought the rest of 95 would come in, building Holiday Inns."
Like Jabara, his father Richard also had grown up in the hotel industry. In 1977, Richard formed a second-generation partnership with attorney Bill Meyer, son of Arthur, to buy a small Holiday Inn in Danbury, Conn., and that was the official beginning of Meyer Jabara Hotels, although it was initially dubbed Motel Hotel Associates. “It is a lovely story around a multi-generational partnership: a Lebanese family and a Jewish family. Partnerships like this take a lot of work, but they’re beautiful. It really is the American Dream,” Jabara said.
When he was 16, Jabara lived in a Marriott and worked in the kitchen. “My father was clear; if we had any inkling of being in this business, we are going to know every aspect of it, and we’re going to start from the bottom. My first job was in room service; I quickly learned how to make tips. I loved being a bellman, in the lobby talking to everybody all day. I worked through every position, including cleaning chicken on the banquet line,” he shared.
Though he had a passion for volunteer firefighting and worked toward getting his EMT cardiac license, the hospitality business was his calling. In his early 20s, after graduating from Johnson & Wales for hospitality, his father sent him to a hotel in New Jersey to address an issue with poor guest scores. “I lived in the hotel and turned it around in eight months,” said Jabara. This pattern continued, where Jabara would be sent to hotels around the East Coast to fix various problems. As his hospitality career grew, he made the decision to stop running into burning buildings and focus on growing the family business.
Developing Properties
Soon, he moved from management into development, a new avenue for the company, as previously the growth had been more organic. Over a period of about five years, Jabara started growing the portfolio, including the addition of third-party hotels. Today, for the company to acquire a hotel, the potential for return on the investment needs to be pretty high: he said that they need to ‘unlock value’ and operationally, know that it can be profitable. “There are certain things you can’t change in a hotel, such as location. It needs to be a product that is competitive from a brand standpoint.”
Today, the Meyer Jabara Hotels portfolio is diverse and consists of 32 hotels in 12 states, from large full-service brands to boutique assets, with multiple properties in the works. Currently, the company owns two-thirds of the hotels in its portfolio, while one-third of the properties are managed by a third party. The smallest is The Menhaden, a luxury hotel in Greenport, Long Island, N.Y. Other representative properties include The Wentworth Inn in Jackson, N.H.; Hilton Wilmington in Delaware; Fairfield Inn, Myrtle Beach (S.C.); Courtyard by Marriott, Bethlehem, Pa.; and the Inn at Henderson’s Wharf in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor.
Thriving During Covid and Beyond
A point of pride for Jabara is not only making it through Covid essentially unscathed, but growing the business and investing heavily in the company’s infrastructure, from new software to creating a business intelligence department and hiring a data architect as well as a regional head of food and beverage. Even if it wasn’t broken, he said, they picked it apart.
He remembers thinking, “we can either be defined by Covid and be a battered company after this or we can take this as an opportunity to really look at our organization and position ourselves post-Covid to be the best in the industry.” Now, he believes that Meyer Jabara Hotels is a better company for it.
Indeed, those investments have paid off, he said, with his company scoring high on organizational health surveys with a correspondingly low turnover rate. “That is a testament to our culture and to our leaders,” he said.
For 2024 and beyond, the 1,600-employee company is pushing for growth, despite the stumbling blocks that the hospitality industry is facing, such as costs of financing and building. “As more consolidation happens in the industry, our feeling is we need to get bigger. In order to be around for another 47 years, we need to scale the business and grow, through good, sound, quality deals, and not growing for the sake of growing,” he said. To that end, they’ve hired a chief investment officer to focus on investments, capital and acquiring hotels, and they are building out a development team.
What drives Jabara is knowing he is touching lives, from guests to employees. “I wake up every day and think about every paycheck that goes out of our company and how many people rely on this paycheck.” And his roots are never far from his mind. “When I was younger and wanted to be around hotels, my grandfather used to tell me, ‘Good things take time. Just take a deep breath.’ When you have a complex organization, I remind myself of that.”