LOS ANGELES -- Amid an ever-changing hotel-industry landscape, Loews Hotels is preparing for its most aggressive growth spurt by touting what it says it's always done well.
"We want to be one of the bigger players in the meetings and convention business," said Alex Tisch, Loews Hotels & Co.'s executive vice president of commercial and business development, speaking between panel sessions at last month's Americas Lodging Investment Summit here.
With 24 hotels totaling about 12,000 rooms already, Loews is planning to add a half-dozen properties by mid-2020. Two of those hotels will open within mixed-use districts being built next to the homes of the Texas Rangers and the St. Louis Cardinals in 2019 and 2020, respectively.
It will add an 800-room hotel next to the Kansas City Convention Center in 2020.
Loews' largest presence, however, will continue to be next to Florida's Universal Orlando, where it operates five hotels and will add the 600-room Aventura Hotel this summer. The company is also planning to build two budget-friendly hotels in Orlando, totaling 2,050 rooms and 750 rooms, respectively, in 2019.
With such locations, Loews is positioning itself well for business from companies that will benefit from the recent corporate tax cut but are also looking to host meetings in locales that are less expensive than the coastal cities.
"If you're going to go to a city like St. Louis or Kansas City, you're probably looking at groups and conventions aiming for something a notch down from the top-tier cities," said STR senior vice president Bobby Bowers. "And I don't know if there's room capacity there."
As it expands, Loews faces the challenge of competing against larger companies such as Marriott International, which acquired Starwood Hotels & Resorts in 2016, and Hilton, which is adding brands and locations to meet a broader spectrum of travelers.
With that in mind, Loews has tweaked its growth strategy from 2012, when the then-18-hotel company vowed to spend $500 million expanding its presence throughout the largest North American cities. While it's since reflagged existing hotels in cities including Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle, the company is adding hotels in locations where there's an additional draw aside from the city itself: the ballparks, convention centers and Universal Orlando.
It's a shrewd strategy, said Larkspur, Calif.-based Jeffery DalPoggetto, a luxury travel adviser with Andavo Travel who said he's regularly booked clients at hotels such as the Loews San Francisco and Seattle's Loews Hotel 1,000.
"They've got themselves positioned [in Orlando] for people who say, 'I don't want to have anything to do with Disney,'" said DalPoggetto. "And the Loews Coronado [near San Diego] is for people who couldn't stand the Hotel del Coronado. So what they've done is smart."
While Loews lacks the size and resulting negotiating power of a Marriott or Hilton to reduce the commissions it pays on OTA bookings, Tisch said the company's emphasis on groups helps offset that because groups are booked directly.
Additionally, Tisch said his company's equity positions -- the company collectively owns about a 60% share of its hotels and will own a 50% share of both its ballpark-adjacent hotels and its new Universal Orlando properties -- lends a sense of stability and a longer-term commitment to a location that hotel operators without such an ownership stake may lack.
"We'd like to embrace being an owner-operator," said Tisch at the conference. "It's probably something you haven't heard this week."