This year, Dallas, Texas-based Coury Hospitality celebrates 40 years since CEO Paul Coury founded Coury Properties, a real estate ownership and development company in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Over those decades, the company’s portfolio has grown to include over 85 branded and independent hotels and restaurants across multiple markets, including both owned assets and management contracts.
To commemorate the occasion, the company held a celebration with about 170 team members at its annual leadership meeting. “We’ll have some other events this year for the clients that we’re doing business with now. The goal is to do something special every month this year. We’re trying to really make it a big milestone, because it is,” Coury told LODGING.
Back in the mid 1980s, Coury worked as a banker in Tulsa, focused on real estate lending, but he had an entrepreneurial mindset. He and a partner bought a downtown office building, which became Coury Properties’ first asset, followed by a historic hotel next door to the building.
Subsequently, he became involved in liquidating the estate of a Chicago family that owned boutique hotels along with golf courses. “It took me about eight years to completely liquidate it, and that’s what really gave me the knowledge of that type of property,” Coury recalled. “By the mid ‘90s, we began developing the Ambassador Hotel Tulsa as our first actual hotel, which remains owned and operated by Coury Hospitality today.”
Partnering with Marriott
The company’s entry into the third-party management space came in the early 2000s, and the next major milestone was in 2014, when Coury Hospitality partnered with Marriott International to operate the Autograph Brand hotels. “We made the strategic decision to lean in heavily and pursue those types of hotels for management contracts,” said Coury, who has served as president of the Tribute & Autograph Collection Advisory Board. “Right now, we have 16 Autograph properties that we operate and seven Tribute properties, and we’ve got about seven more of those two brands combined in the pipeline. So, we will be the largest operator of those two brands combined. And I’m involved with nine different Autographs and Tributes either as the main partner or an investor, and then we have some partners within our operating platform that own some as well.”
Coury Hospitality became known for its focus on lifestyle brands, and Coury regards Marriott’s products in that segment as among the highest performers. “They’re so far ahead of what everyone else is doing in the soft-brand world. The last two years, when RevPAR has been flat to negative on some of the limited service and hard brands, this lifestyle product is still growing at 3 to 4 percent,” he noted.
Coury Hospitality’s background in ownership is an asset to many developers, one that complements and informs their management service. “Part of what we try to advocate and pursue is thinking like an owner, and one of the [reasons] I think that people are attracted to our company is our experience and knowledge [as an owner],” Coury explained. “A lot of the people that we work for on these brands are one-off developers, probably successful developers. Some of them may have been in other segments of the real estate industry and decide to [develop] a hotel, and so they rely heavily on me for a lot of their strategic decisions with the asset, beyond just the [operation] of it.”
2025 Expansion
Coury Hospitality doubled its hotel portfolio last year to 42 properties and expanded into new destinations through hotel openings and management acquisitions across California, Chicago, Atlantic City, and Florida, among others. The opening of HALL Park Hotel in Frisco, Texas, earned Coury Hospitality the Marriott 2025 Opening Hotel of the Year award.
To align with this growth, the company has scaled up its team, which currently consists of 75 “Experience Curators” on the corporate side and about 3,800 employees. “We brought in 30 new corporate team members,” said Coury. “Our president, Andrew Casperson, joined a few years ago, and he’s been very strategic in managing through this growth. And then we brought a gentleman in from the West Coast, Bo Patel, as chief operating officer when we took over a large portfolio there.”
Sharing his approach to retaining talent, Coury maintains it “goes back to the Golden Rule: treat someone the way you want someone to treat you. … I definitely think loyalty comes with that. So, we don’t just ask for loyalty. We try to earn it. We do things for [staff] with bonus programs. … And even though we’re not a ‘family business’ anymore, we want to feel like that. … If you look at our retention, both corporate and on property, we’re way above the industry standard—20 percent above the national average, and at the corporate level we’re at about 87 percent retention.”
Vin Hotel Collection
After four decades in the business, Coury Hospitality will continue to grow in the near future with nine hotels in the pipeline, including the expansion of its proprietary Vin Hotel Collection, launched in 2020. The brand’s flagship property, Hotel Vin in Grapevine, Texas, is under construction to double in size and set to open in 2027, and Hotel Vin Rogers is opening in Rogers, Arkansas, this fall. The brand is “wine-inspired and wine educational,” said Coury. “It’s been a very successful brand, and when you put the Autograph engine on it, we think that it’s got some real growth potential. We’re getting a lot of inquiries about this brand because it’s very portable. You could put a wine-inspired hotel literally anywhere and brand around it. So, it’s a very easy concept to apply to the right location.”
The wine focus dovetails with the company’s emphasis on F&B as a revenue generator. “We will continue to lean in with the food and beverage outlets,” said Coury. “We have 75 different bars and restaurant concepts, and we want to do business with the right people that share our vision about quality.”
