Hyatt Hotels Pays US$148m for Iconic Ventana Big Sur Resort

Main Photo: The iconic Ventana Big Sur Resort

Date: June 2021

Location: Big Sur, California, USA

Name: Ventana Big Sur, an Alila Resort

No. of Keys: 59

Seller: Geolo Capital, the private equity investment arm of the John Pritzker family office, and it’s joint-venture partner Wanxiang America Real Estate. 

John Pritzker hails from the Chicago-based family behind Hyatt Hotels, which is chaired by his brother Tom Pritzker. John sold his shares in Hyatt to relatives in 2010 and went on to build his own boutique hotel management company, which became known as Two Roads Hospitality after a 2016 merger, and was sold to Hyatt in 2018.

Buyer: The JV has sold the iconic Ventana Big Sur, an Alila Resort, to an affiliate of the Hyatt Hotels Corp. for $148 million. The sale of the hotel in Big Sur, Calif., achieves a record $2.5 million per-key price for a North American resort, according to an analysis by Hodges Ward Elliott and Real Capital Analytics.

After acquiring Ventana in 2015 and leveraging its vertically integrated design and development, asset management and legacy hotel operating businesses, Geolo transformed the property into one of the most acclaimed and financially successful resorts in North America.

“We saw substantial unrealized value in controlling 59 of Big Sur’s 100 available full-service guestrooms and understood the potential to raise average daily rates following a comprehensive renovation, rebrand and repositioning,” said John Pritzker, Geolo founding partner and director. “There is an old saying, ‘Always leave the campground better than you found it.’ We’ve been the stewards of Ventana for the past six years and are incredibly proud of the improvements we’ve made to the property. I am thrilled that Hyatt will be the steward of Ventana Big Sur’s next chapter.”

The sale marks Geolo’s successful roundtrip investment of the Ventana Big Sur resort, as well as its investment in the Alila brand — a company which Geolo acquired in 2014, attached to Ventana in 2017, and sold to Hyatt in 2018.

Geolo’s strategy at Ventana was drawn from elements of its playbook from the successful repositioning of Carmel Valley Ranch in Carmel-by-the-Sea, Calif., a property it acquired and transformed in 2009. This included focusing on extensive experiential programming as pillars of the reimagined resort. Originally developed in 1975, Ventana had a 40-year track record of operations. Geolo took the property to the next level, challenging the status quo both in terms of operations and physical improvements, by investing $23 million to complete a major renovation.

Geolo’s improvements to the property included updating all 59 guestrooms, and the team paid special attention to highlighting the property’s incredible outdoor vistas spread throughout the resort’s 160 acres. Safari-style camping tents were created in the resort’s century-old redwood grove, the architecturally distinctive Glass House Gallery was constructed and an underutilized parking lot was converted into a sweeping ocean meadow.

Following the repositioning and Ventana’s alignment with the Alila brand, the property grew to achieve the highest revenue per available room of any hotel across Hyatt’s more than 1,000 global hotels and resorts.

Price: $148m

Price per Key: $2,508,475

THPT Comment: OK the parties clearly have an interesting inter-linked relationship, but assuming that the transaction is at arms-distance, it’s a fab deal for Geolo whichever way one looks at it. $2.5m a key!

First Seen: Institutional Real Estate

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