It’s midnight. Everyone at the hotel is sleeping. Suddenly, the hotel is surrounded by guards. Then construction workers. Every sign indicating the brand affiliation is removed. Menus, napkins and towels are all replaced. The sun rises. The hotel’s workers are summoned to a conference room and fired. When executives from the hotel management company attempt to enter the hotel they have managed for the last five years and have a contractual right to manage for the next 40, they are barred from the property.
Does this sound like the plot of the next summer blockbuster? It’s not. Rather, these are the facts of a series of recent cases in which owners of luxury hotels terminated their long-term hotel management agreements overnight in what has been described as the hospitality industry’s version of a “coup d’état.”1
