Owners of luxury hotels, facing debt payments, may want their operators to raise revenue by cutting room rates - a move operators resist because it cheapens the brand.
It is not often that luxury hotel owners find themselves locked out of their own properties, but that is what the lawyers for owners say has happened at the Four Seasons Resort Aviara, north of San Diego.
This month, Four Seasons added security, including personnel at checkpoints, to head off owners and their representatives. The owners have accused Four Seasons of mismanagement, tried to fire the company and named a replacement operator - who so far has not set foot on the property.
The two sides seem to agree on only one thing - that, as Elizabeth Pizzinato, vice president for brand communications at Four Seasons, put it, 'this has really been unprecedented.'
But there are almost certainly going to be more such hotel wars. Owners and operators are fighting more often and more intensely as the economic downturn reduces the number of guests and forces down rates while owners struggle to cope with debt payments on their multimillion-dollar properties, say industry analysts.
The disputes have usually not become public because contracts between hotel operators and owners require arbitration, but some have grown so contentious that, like the one involving the Aviara resort, they have ended up in open court.
'There are things that brand managers do that really annoy owners,' said Bjorn Hanson, associate professor of hospitality and tourism management at Preston Robert Tisch Center for Hospitality, Tourism and Sports Management at New York University.
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Source - New York Times
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