Sonasta CEO and President Interview - Stephanie Sonnabend
December 1, 2009 - The Wall Street Transcript has just published Travel and Leisure--Airlines, Hotels, Resorts, Cruise Lines, and Restaurants Report offering a timely review of the Leisure sector. This Special Report contains expert industry commentary through in-depth interviews with public company CEOs, Equity Analysts and Money Managers. Please find an excerpt below.
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Stephanie Sonnabend is Chief Executive Officer, President and a member of the board of directors of Sonesta International Hotels Corp., the hotel business her grandfather, A.M. Sonnabend, founded in the 1940s. Ms. Sonnabend oversees the company's 29 hotels, resorts and Nile cruises located in the United States, St. Maarten, Egypt, Peru, Colombia, Chile and Brazil. In 2007 she celebrated her 30th year with the company.
Prior to becoming CEO and President in 2003, Ms. Sonnabend served as Sonesta's President since 1996, Executive Vice President from 1993 to 1995 and Vice President of Marketing from 1984 to 1992. Her professional memberships include the World Presidents' Organization, Massachusetts Women's Forum and the Boston Club. She serves on the board of overseers of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and the New England Conservatory of Music, where she chairs the facilities committee. She is currently on the board of directors of Century Bank & Trust and Century Bancorp, where she is a member of the audit and asset liability committees.
In 2005 Ms. Sonnabend launched Youth Micro Credit International, a student-run organization whose mission is to spread the word that small amounts of money loaned to people in developing countries can significantly improve their lives. A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard University, Ms. Sonnabend received her master's degree from MIT's Sloan School of Management.
TWST: Please start with a brief history and overview of Sonesta.
Ms. Sonnabend: Sonesta (SNSTA) 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.
TWST: Hotel and cruise combined?
Ms. Sonnabend: Hotel and cruise under Sonesta, correct; 267 rooms are cruise, so the majority are hotels - about 5,500 hotel rooms.
TWST: How much of the overall business do the cruise ships represent versus the hotel/resort properties?
Ms. Sonnabend: Our cruise ships are relatively small, anywhere from 35 cabins on up to the largest one, which is under 70 cabins. And our smallest boat is actually eight cabins.
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