Ms. Sonnabend: Sonesta is a company that was started in the 1940s by my grandfather, A.M. Sonnabend, who was involved in real estate and was an entrepreneur who invested in hotels. And at that point, he also bought into a public company, so we've been public since the 1940s. We're currently traded on Nasdaq, and since that time the company has grown and evolved to where it is today. It had a number of different names early on - Sonnabend Operated Hotels, Hotel Corporation of America - and the name became Sonesta in the early 1970s as a way to unify our hotels under one brand.
TWST: How many properties do you have in your portfolio today? How do they break down in terms of owned versus managed versus franchised? What geographic markets do you have a presence in?
Ms. Sonnabend: We have 29 properties in total. Three of them are in the United States, so 26 are international. We own one of them, the Royal Sonesta Hotel in Boston, and then we have a lease in the Royal Sonesta Hotel in New Orleans. And our other one in the United States, in Miami, is a managed property. We also manage six hotels and six cruises on the Nile in Egypt, so we've got 12 properties in Egypt, about 2,500 rooms. We also have an international franchise program, where we have two franchise hotels in St. Maarten, six in Peru, three in Chile, one in Colombia and two in Brazil. The total room count is about 5,700 rooms collectionwide.
Tickers included in this excerpt: SNSTA
For more information call (212) 952 7433. The Wall Street Transcript does not endorse any of the comments made by interviewees, and does not make stock recommendations.