Loews Hotels & Co is keeping it all in the family.
Alex Tisch is set to take on the role of CEO at Loews Hotels & Co, a wholly owned subsidiary of Loews Corp., effective Jan. 1, 2023. Tisch is the cousin of Jonathan Tisch, the current CEO, who will become executive chairman, while remaining a member of the office of the president and co-chairman of the board of Loews Corp.
Alex Tisch joined Loews Hotels & Co in June 2017 and took on the role of president in September 2020. Over the past five years he has overseen the $2.5-billion dollar redefined growth strategy and expansion, honing in on Loews’ leverage of being an owner, operator and developer of hotels.
As president & CEO, he will oversee the day-to-day operations of the company, as well as the development and execution of the organization’s strategy and the management of capital and resource allocation.
Succession Plans
Hotel Management spoke to the incoming CEO exclusively this morning and to hear it from him, not much will change with the overall direction of the company, which will continue to focus on new development opportunities and lean further into its legacy owner/operator strategy.
Tisch said that he and his cousin began discussing succession plans in the middle of the summer. "I think he felt this was the right time for him to focus on things outside of the business that pique his interest," Alex Tisch said. "Everything's in such good shape and, frankly, there's nothing broken. So it's going to be pretty seamless as far as how we run the business because we've been doing a lot of it together for a long time. And the way we think about our strategy, nothing's really changing, but for the fact that that I'm assuming the [CEO] role."
To hear it from Tisch, the company is in a healthy place despite the macroeconomic headwinds blowing hard into the face of all lodging companies. Hotel ownership is oftentimes a debt-driven business, but Tisch said that Loews' 26 hotels are "conservatively leveraged" across the business.
"We we have very few assets that we view as having any real credit issues," he said. "Secondly, we're an owner and operator and our ability really to make the best decisions for our assets is different and we're capable of doing things a lot more quicker than then if we were just an owner or just an operator. I think that downturns cause a decent amount of conflict of interest between those two things."
Owning and Operating
Loews' track record as a solid owner and operator has allowed it to even flourish during the pandemic. In October 2021, Loews Hotels & Co broke ground on the $550-million Loews Arlington Hotel and Convention Center, which was financed by a $300 million loan from MetLife Investment Management.
"We were one of the very few companies in the world that was able to get a very large construction loan for a convention center project in the middle of the pandemic," Tisch said, offering that a downturn is still likely to come but that it won't be as pronounced as earlier ones, including the tech burst, global financial crisis and COVID.
New development, rather than acquisitions, is likely the mode of expansion for Loews going forward, Tisch said, alluding also to the current dearth of new shovel-ready projects as a result of the tightened credit markets. "This is how we set ourselves up for the long-term future," he said, "understanding that we can be acquisitive if the right product comes up for sale either through, for instance, a distress cycle."
Loews' owner/operator approach is also not going anywhere. Though the company has flirted, Tisch said, with the idea of moving to an asset-light model, ultimately it's a strategy that behooves those with scale, the likes of Marriott, Hilton, IHG, Hyatt and others. "Their distribution is so vast relative to ours that in order to be able to give us, an owner, the same value proposition, we'd have to grow the portfolio exponentially," he said.
Rather, Loews looks to grow with partners and seek out locations with high demand generators. Its projects in St. Louis and Arlington are testament to that, whereby a Loews hotel helps anchor an experiential community. In Arlington, for instance, the new hotel set to open in 2024 will be situated between Globe-Life Field (home of the Texas Rangers) and AT&T Stadium (home of the Dallas Cowboys) and connected to the new Loews Arlington Convention Center, also opening in 2024.
"Being an owner and operator and partnering with demand generation is a better way for us to compete," he said. "And then if you add meeting space to that, it really is our bread and butter."
Tisch and Loews are bullish on the full return of the meetings business, group business and corporate demand. "We are seeing in the data that meeting experiences are already back to where it was in 2019," Tisch said. "We believe that in person meetings have a very big place in the future of how companies meet and our portfolio is aligned with that."
Before being named CEO, Alex Tisch oversaw the additions to the portfolio of Live! by Loews – Arlington, Texas, in 2019; Live! by Loews – St. Louis in 2020; Universal’s Endless Summer Resort in 2020; and Loews Kansas City, Mo., in 2020.
Loews Coral Gables, Fla., is set to open on Nov. 3.
Tisch is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and received his MBA from the NYU Stern School of Business. He sits on the Board of Directors of the American Hotel & Lodging Association, The National Medal of Honor Museum, Moda Operandi and the New York City Police Foundation.