Article Excerpt:
TWST: What is WestCoast Hospitality?Mr. Taffin: WestCoast Hospitality really started in the late 1930s as a real estate management company, and the original name of the company was Goodale and Barbieri. They were the partners who created the management company, and they managed real estate in a third-party manner and also started, over the years, to develop real estate ' commercial, retail and residential. And for a number of decades, the company remained a real estate management development company. In the mid 1970s, the company entered the hospitality industry by developing a hotel in Spokane, and that hotel still is in the portfolio; it's the Red Lion River Inn. We began the process of developing and acquiring hotels in the late 1970s. In the mid-1990s, the company decided that in order to remain competitive in the hospitality side of the business it would have to significantly grow. So a decision was made to go public in 1997, the public offering happened in April 1998, and the company started to acquire hotels. The brand at that time was a proprietary brand by the name of Cavanaughs Hotels, and prior to going public there were 11 Cavanaughs Hotels, primarily in the Pacific Northwest in Washington, Idaho and Montana. After going public, acquisitions were made throughout the western states. In 1998, I believe there were 11 properties that were purchased. In 1999, Cavanaughs purchased WestCoast Hotels. At that point WestCoast Hotels was a lodging management company and also a franchising company. Cavanaughs was, before that, simply an owned and managed company with its own flag, so the purchase of WestCoast allowed us a springboard to get into the third-party management side for lodging and franchising. In 2001, at the end of the year, we purchased Red Lion Hotels from Hilton, and we had two brands at that point. WestCoast had replaced Cavanaughs, and after purchasing Red Lion, we actually supported then two brands ' Red Lion with the potential to be a national brand with strong flag hotels known as Red Lions, and WestCoast Hotels being hotels that were in a more regional western states marketplace and had some distinguishing characteristic to the name, or a historical hotel that would be known more for its historical name than its flag name. The final section of the company is our entertainment division that grew during the 1980s in the Spokane market. The public venues were interested in providing a ticketing service or finding a vendor to handle ticketing services for the Spokane markets. Since we are a historical Spokane company and we knew what was happening, we entered the ticketing business at that point in time, entered into an agreement with the city to provide ticketing for all the public venues, and determined that there was an opportunity as well to present entertainment for the city. That ticketing company and presenting company transitioned into a company called TicketsWest in the late 1990s and now has venues in many western states and provides millions of tickets a year. We have a central reservation system that handles both lodging reservation ticketing and enhances the synergies between the two with cross selling opportunities. So the company has grown significantly in the last seven or eight years.
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