HM Q&A Outrigger plans to grow its presence in Asia Pacific
TO THE TOP AT AHICE 2022, OUTRIGGER CEO JEFF WAGONER SPOKE TO JAMES WILKINSON ABOUT HIS AUSTRALIAN PROPERTY WISH LIST, TAKING RISKS ON COMPLICATED DEALS, AND THE COMPANY'S MISSION TO BE THE BEST. As a resort brand, with properties in some very remote places, how important is sustainability?
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hrough our program OZONE (Outrigger’s zone), we’ve been focused on conservation for a long time, supporting coral reef preservation and so forth. But the bigger element here, for us anyway, is the rising sea level. As a premier beach resort brand, it’s honestly hard to get your head around. I was at a conference recently where someone started talking about different countries that will be underwater in the future. It’s tough to have that really sink in and think about how we can do something now it’s going to make a difference in the future, but it matters. In Hawaii for example, they have started to draw boundaries in certain places around all of the islands where you cannot develop. If your asset becomes damaged inside those boundaries, you cannot recreate the asset in that particular location. That’s how important conservation and sustainability are. This isn’t just about single-use plastic bottles or straws, it’s literally about the sustainability of our planet for the future that we all need to be involved in. 26
HM The Business of Accommodation
You’ve just acquired a hotel in Kona, Hawaii. When you are acquiring these assets, what kind of sustainability initiatives do you have in place to be one step ahead?
We really try to look at authenticity in developing the resort experience. In Kona, for example, King Kamehameha III was born on that property. We want to lean into the history of the places that we operate in, so we’ve been able to develop – in each one of the properties that we have – a playbook of how to go in and research the market to find out what happened on the land and who was there before. That’s so important to us in the curating of each asset that we have.
When it comes to new markets, Australia is very high up on your list. What kinds of areas are on your wish list at the moment?
Australia is certainly high on Outrigger’s wish list. We actually hired the global consulting firm McKinsey during the pandemic to do some research to understand if the customer is looking for different things in the future. Through that whole process, we learned that we need to evolve, and we need to change. We learned that the consumer across the globe said that if you can walk to the beach, you can call that a beach property – so that’s what we’re looking for today. We’d love to be ‘toes in the sand,’ but if we can’t, that’s fine too. Australia is high on our list, Bali is high on our list as well, and then a lot of the Hawaiian Islands, we’d love to be able to grow there. We’ve got 26 properties already in Hawaii, so we’re really concentrating outside of Hawaii in Asia Pacific and the Australia market.
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