Margaritaville is a destination, said John Cohlan, which makes it more than a famous Jimmy Buffett song. In fact, it is a growing hotel business and a natural sweet spot for the entertainer who parlayed his famous beach anthem into a restaurant, merchandise, entertainment and, for the past four years, hotel business into a US$1 billion a year enterprise.
The first offshoot, the Margaritaville restaurant, which opened in Key West, Florida, in 1987, still stands today. However, Cohlan, the CEO of Margaritaville Holdings, told HOTELS the right hotel licensing opportunity didn’t surface until four years ago in Pensacola, Florida, when the owner of a new US$45 million investment changed her mind about branding just months before opening and pioneered the Margaritaville hotel concept.
Today, Cohlan can tout the likes of Barry Sternlicht’s Starwood Capital as a lead investor in the new 349-room Margaritaville resort on the beach in Hollywood, Florida, which is managed by Coral Hospitality. The Margaritaville team sells the brand license, manages the multiple F&B outlets as well as the Margaritaville customer experience, which it has honed over the past 28 years.
Without hotel experience when it made the first deal in Pensacola, Cohlan recruited the Palm Beach, Florida-based CEO of The Breakers, Paul Leone, to consult and help navigate the company to attract the right people on the hotel brand management side. To date, more than US$1 billion in capital has gone into developing the brand with Margaritaville Holdings putting many of the hotel projects together.
After the fifth property opened in Hollywood, the next hotel under development is in Orlando, Florida. Add two vacation ownership partnership mixed-use resorts with Wyndham Vacation Ownership and Cohlan and company has developed some critical mass with several more projects under development – mostly in the southeastern U.S., as well as the Caribbean, where the group is also looking at all-inclusive opportunities.
Cohlan, with global aspirations, said within the next six months, two or three other hotel license deals will be finalized and will include a property that will open next year, another that will be rebranded and one new development.
“We have always thought hotels should be a growth driver for the brand,” Cohlan said. “It wasn’t at first because it is so capital intensive and we had to walk first. When the Pensacola hotel opened about four years ago we got our start. For someone with a US$45 million investment, our brand made sense. We’ve grown quickly from there.”