Transcript: Episode 150: Wedding Wing Man
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[00:00:00] Susan Barry: This is Top Floor episode 150. You can find the show notes at topfloorpodcast.com/episode/150.
[00:00:13] Narrator: Welcome to Top Floor with Susan Barry. This weekly podcast ride up to the top floor features tangible tips and excellent stories from the experts and characters who elevate hospitality. And now your host and elevator operator, Susan Barry.
[00:00:32] Susan Barry: Welcome to the show. Jen Barnwell was pulled into the hotel business by her sister, but a frontline operations job was not for her. Instead, Jen pursued the analytical side of the industry, working in development and investments for Tishman, Peninsular Real Estate and Pebble Brook Hotel Trust. When Pebble Brook wanted to take its internal cost savings programs to the public, Jen was tapped to serve as president of Curator Hotel and Resort Collection, backed by Pebble Brook. Today, we are going to talk about championing independent lifestyle boutique hotels, but before we jump in, we need to answer the call button.
Call button rings
[00:01:20] Susan Barry: The emergency call button is our hotline for hospitality professionals and anyone else who has burning questions. If you would like to submit a question, you can call or text me at 850 404 9630.
Today's question comes from Brandy and Brandy asks, this is such a hard question. What does lifestyle mean when it comes to hotels? I feel like I could probably talk about seven paragraphs and still not encapsulate it. So no harm done if this is too hard of a question, but I'm sure you have an excellent answer.
[00:01:59] Jennifer Barnwell: To me personally, I think where we are today, lifestyle can mean both being part of a big brand hotel, but it can also mean truly independent. Marriott, Hilton, Hyatt, like they all have lifestyle brands, which means they're just more creative and in the world of a big brand, you know, kind of unique, um, in the world, in the independent world, uh, we've got, we say the word independent, which means you're not part of a big brand whatsoever.
And you could say lifestyle too, if you want, because again, they tend to be creative, interesting, different kind of a brand of one. Um, so to say, we also use the word boutique a lot that tends to mean more of a, you know, something that's smaller, maybe 70 rooms, maybe even 50 or less rooms is usually gets the boutique moniker.
But I think lifestyle can where we are today can go either way. You could be part of a big brand and be a lifestyle brand or you could be truly independent and still call yourself lifestyle.
[00:03:08] Susan Barry: It's a tough one for sure. And I wonder if it resonates with consumers at all. I wonder if there's anyone out on the other side of the computer screen saying, let me find some lifestyle hotels to peruse for my trip, or is it more that the feeling the hotel creates is what lifestyle means? Does that make sense?
[00:03:33] Jennifer Barnwell: Yeah, I think it's definitely the latter of what you just said. I don't think consumers are - even use the term lifestyle to do any searches. Like we, I know we'll get into it in a little bit, but we do some of our own digital marketing and we don't buy the word lifestyle. We buy a bunch of other keywords that we think people are using to search.
[00:03:55] Susan Barry: Gotcha. I think that's a good, uh, pull quote for Brandy. Nobody's buying the word lifestyle. So both your siblings and you went to Cornell and you blame your sister for sort of drawing you into the hotel school. What happened?
[00:04:13] Jennifer Barnwell: You know, it's pretty incredible. She just knew, uh, so when she was, you know, heading into the end of high school and figuring out what she wanted to do for, you know, her next set of education. She just knew she wanted to be in the hotel industry. And, you know, I was younger at the time. I don't really know how she knew, but she knew and Cornell was the place. I was deciding between Penn and Cornell and I was, I played volleyball. So I'd been recruited for, for both volleyball teams in the Ivy league. And I just ended up choosing Cornell. I mean, probably because it was closer to where I grew up and my sister was already there. And I thought I could get more of a business education. I actually started in arts and sciences and I was on work study. So my sister was working at the hotel on campus at Cornell.
And she was like, of course, you're going to work at the Statler, just like come work there. That can be a work study job. And she was like, what are you doing? Just like you're already here working in the hotel and you, you know, you're meeting a bunch of hoteliers - just transfer. And it's certainly evolved since the time I graduated, which was way back in 1996, but I could do accounting and statistics and a bunch of business and real estate finance courses, which was really kind of, you know, my jam, as you would say. So she took me under her wing and brought me in and, um, she went a different path. She's in operations. That's, you know, her forte, what she's good at. And she just killing it in operations. And I am more, you know, behind my computer screen, you know, in the corporate office trying to make deals and make things happen.
[00:05:53] Susan Barry: You mentioned doing accounting and real estate and finance in your hotel school experience. You know, when I was working on property as a hotel director of sales and marketing, I really didn't know that that side of the business even existed, like that analytics or asset management were even a thing. Meanwhile, at about the same time, that's where you started your career. So can you talk about what that job was like and if it's changed at all since then?
[00:06:24] Jennifer Barnwell: Oh yeah, certainly. So right out of school, I went to Tishman Hotel and Realty. Uh, big corporate job. They were already like a hundred year old construction company, and I created this real estate group that started with building pretty big convention center hotels, basically right by Walt Disney World. Um, and so they were. Um, sounds like I'm reading their collateral, but it was truly a vertically integrated organization where they were recruiting analysts out of college, out of undergraduate every year, and you would get placed with, you know, different project teams and really be able to work on a variety of things.
It was just, um, slower. And everything was written, and you know, you'd get documents messaged, messaged to you, message to you, and you would like fax things around to people. Um, but you would get, you know, financial statements and data about sales bookings and group bookings and leisure bookings and all that stuff, like once a month. So this data would come in, I think we would get hard copies delivered to us and I would tap, tap, tap, you know, I'd hard code all the numbers into our spreadsheets and create these books every month. Fast forward to today. It's completely different. I mean, there is so much data you can tap into.
You can look at data, some data, of course, daily, some data, even hourly if you want, there's dashboards, like you're just logging into systems. You can export, you know, every kind of report you want related to sales figures, related to bookings case, uh, you can look at, you know, how you're trending with your financial picture. It's changed in that there's so much more data available to everybody on a much quicker basis. And so much more functionality with the systems that are available to the hotels and you just have to parse through the data, you know, in a smart way and be focused on the right things that can help you with decision making.
[00:08:41] Susan Barry: I have to wonder if the profusion of data helps or hurts. And the reason I'm saying this, this is, I'm maybe getting going down a rabbit hole a little bit, but one of my frustrations with every single participant in a weekly revenue strategy meeting is the focus on what happened last week versus looking forward. So 45 minutes of an hour long meeting are spent on, could we have made 13 more cents? Yes or no. Versus like, there's all these need dates six months from now. What are we even doing to impact them? And I almost wonder if it's because it's like you have the information. So you need to poke at it. I don't know if I'm if that's a question or a speech. But what do you think?
[00:09:37] Jennifer Barnwell: Yeah, I totally get what you're saying. I think our approach to that in particular when I was an asset manager for Pebble Brook Hotel Trust was don't spend too much time on the history because it's like it happened. There's nothing you can do about it now. Once things are actualized, there's nothing you can do, but just try to learn from it.
[00:09:56] Susan Barry: Well, and the other part of that is that if you're spending all of this time litigating the past, then you're training the hotel team to spend all of their time preparing the CYA for that litigation versus doing the work that neat, that will like make situation better in the future. Enough of my soapbox.
[00:10:17] Jennifer Barnwell: Right.
[00:10:18] Susan Barry: Have you ever or would you ever consider another asset class in real estate or a different industry other than hotels? Or are you a lifer?
[00:10:29] Jennifer Barnwell: Where do you go from hotels, Susan?
[00:10:30] Susan Barry: I agree. I know. I totally agree. And nothing could be more interesting,
[00:10:35] Jennifer Barnwell: Right? I mean, I think about it because you know, they're very successful and obviously very smart people and all the different types of real estate.But I, I do find myself for a very long time now feeling thankful that I did end up in hotels. Like they're so kind of wonderfully complicated. I mean, I would also say sophisticated, but maybe more like challenging. And I mean, the most amazing people too. I mean, I, again, I've been very fortunate to live very heavily in kind of the independent boutique sector for the last number of years. And it just, the most amazing people, you know, that are really in it and love it working in hotels. I mean, just. Servicing people kind of all day long and making their day and trying to give them great experiences. So it's hard to think, oh, well, and I'm just going to like go to office leasing.
[00:11:38] Susan Barry: Boring!
[00:11:39] Jennifer Barnwell: Boring, right? I mean, I've been involved in so many amazing hotel renovations and transformations and the fabrics and the paint and the artwork and everything. And then, you know, I'm, our office is spectacular comparatively because we're a hotel company, but it's like, how many drab, you know, uh, attorneys office spaces have you been in or even like medical office spaces and it's just like I think we're, I think we're where it's at. I wouldn't go to another asset class.
[00:12:10] Susan Barry: Understood. Curator Hotel and Resort Collection was created to offer, I guess, the purchasing programs that Pebble Brook had created for its own hotels to the greater industry. So it's sort of like a membership organization for independent hotels. It provides them the services and cost savings that allow them to stay independent? Question mark? Let me know if I got any of that wrong. And then I would love to know what are sort of the spectrum of the services.
[00:12:46] Jennifer Barnwell: Yeah, you definitely got that right. Um, so the genesis of Curator was - I was an asset manage manager with Pebble Brook at the time and Pebble Brook bought another publicly traded hotel retail. So you combine the company, all of a sudden you've more than double your portfolio. You have much more scale than you did before. You have some leverage. So Curator ended up being a natural outgrowth of what Pebble Brook did for itself, meaning we're so much bigger now, do we have some more leverage? Can we get, let's see where we're spending all of our money? Can we get our costs down, you know, for lack of a better term, kind of make sure we're working with the best vendors and maybe squeeze them a little bit because we want the cost to come down.
We're bigger now. So we're going to give them more business, you know, with all these hotels that we just acquired or maybe extend terms, whatever it may be. So that was extremely successful internally at Pebble Brook itself. And lots of vendors were involved in that. Lots of, you know, Pebble Brook works with many, many operators and everyone was really just interested in all these deals Pebble Brook had made for itself. The operators were like, can I get, you know, your deals on the other hotels I manage? And the vendors are like, how do we get in with you? You know, we'll give you special terms too. So we just thought, let's spin this out. Let's make it public facing to benefit independent and boutique hotels. Pebble Brook had always been a leader kind of in the REIT space with on the ownership side of focusing on independents and boutiques and seeing the opportunities there.
LaSalle had quite a few too, so when you combine the company, they had a very sizable portfolio of independents and boutiques. So why not, again, spin this out to benefit others. Let's work together on this on the cost side of things, why not work together? Um, we shouldn't be a competition on that on that in those aspects. So we launched as a B to B business trying to benefit independents and boutiques. And the idea was, we'll find the best vendor. In all these different disciplines, whether it's a system, software, its products, its services, whatever it may be, find the best vendor or multiple vendors, and then negotiate the best deals like we've ever seen, or the same, like the best we've ever seen, or maybe even better because we have the promise of scale.
Curator is going to be big. And we did that. So we launched in November 2020. If you come in to the collection as a member, then you're privy to all of our deals. You know, the biggest kind of winners we have so far in our programs base is really the entire tech stack. So we have deals with property management systems with a central res system with revenue management. With point of sales, you know, for your F and B operations. Um, we have deals with third party AV companies with parking operators. We have a deal with a very specific GPO. So we try, we've tried to harness deals for almost everything and a full service hotel operation needs, and then they can pick and choose.
So everything we do has this owner mentality where it's, it's fully transparent, it's collaborative and it's flexible. So come in, um, we're going to educate you on all of our offerings. Our goal is to save you money, which means you have more profit. Your hotel valuation goes up. And it's an ROI play. So you come into a Curator and you get something out of it. Like it's a net positive for you. Um, so that's kind of how we launched back in November, 2020. And one other thing I should mention is also credit card processing, but it could be anywhere from, because we have a whole range of, of property sizes, you know, but why would you turn, you know, your, yourself away from, you know, some programs could be, you know, $2,500 of savings or $5,000 of savings. Whereas, you know, the credit card processing, we've seen 10, 20, 50, if you can believe it, even like a hundred thousand dollars, $150,000 of savings.
[00:17:10] Susan Barry: Holy moly.
[00:17:11] Jennifer Barnwell: So it's a pretty big range dependent on the program and the profile of the hotel. But our goal is to get our member properties signed up in multiple programs. So that in aggregate, they're saving a multiple of pretty small level of fees that they will be paying us sometime in the future.
[00:17:35] Susan Barry: Got it. I know that sort of the mission is to help independent hotels stay independent. Why is that important to you and to Curator?
[00:17:48] Jennifer Barnwell: I mean, I would say because… I mean, just all these independent and boutique properties, they're just a spectacular subset of our industry. Um, you know, and there's room, by the way, there's room for everyone, I'm not trying to be hypercritical. Um, you know, having this diversity from a product standpoint in our industry completely makes sense. I mean, some people just want to stay in a box and they want to get their points and, um, they just want, um, certainty and consistency, right? And then, um, all of us are a little bit different, but there's plenty of people who actually want to have a memorable experience, have something that has spectacular interior design that has some storytelling component to it.
I mean, even things like, you know, interesting uniforms and, you know, the staff at the hotel is just so warm and inviting and kind of does things a little bit differently than you're used to. It's just, there's nothing like it. There's so much creativity that can be presented in that space. There's so much flexibility. The people that work and want to work in independents and boutiques are really special and really thoughtful and really passionate more so than in other property types that I've seen. So we love to say we're champions of independents. Um, and we've seen a ton of consolidation over the last number of years, but the brands kind of scooping up, uh, the big brands scooping up some independents and smaller brands. And I know why they're doing it, like it makes sense for them. And that just maybe creates a new cycle. So independents and boutiques aren't going away. Some get snapped up and then that just creates room for people to create an IDA and create new, new independents and boutiques.
[00:19:47] Susan Barry: I think if I were sort of like the master orchestrator of the industry, we have to have independent hotels because they're the leading edge there where people can move quickly and try new things without it having to be like a seven month process. I say seven months, we know it's seven years, but you know what I mean? We need that leading edge to move the industry as a whole forward. Over time. So I know we talked a lot about sort of products, tech stack, those kinds of things. Is there a consumer facing aspect of Curator like marketing to travelers or meeting planners or, you know, that kind of thing? Or is it all sort of goods and services that are happening internally?
[00:20:37] Jennifer Barnwell: Yeah, we actually, we have, uh, pivoted to also be a B2C company. Very recently. It was really the end of last year. We were like, okay, you know, we have this amazing group of a hundred plus hotels. Let's see what we can do with it in terms of growing consumer awareness about Curator, which then leads to people discovering all the amazing hotels we have in the collection. But it's at the Curator level. So it's additive to what the hotels are already doing for themselves. We relaunched our website back in September to be honestly, it's kind of mostly consumer facing. It's very visual, very focused on the properties, but also experiences that the properties have come up with.
So I'm not talking about, you know, when you come and stay at a hotel, what's your experience? Like, is the service good? And is the bed nice? And the bathroom's clean. I'm talking about like, you know, renting a VW van and driving down to Malibu and getting a surfing one on one surfing lesson and having snacks in the van and then going back. Or, you know, driving down to a vineyard in Mexico from San Diego and having this wonderful all day experience and then coming back. So we've been working —
[00:22:00] Susan Barry: I checked them out and there were so many that I wanted to do. I was like, Hmm, can I just book the experience only? And
[00:22:07] Jennifer Barnwell: Yeah, you could actually, I mean, that's what we're trying to go for. So, uh, It's an, it's an interesting experience or experiment because you were all hearing a lot about, especially all of this year so far, about how important experiential travel is and experiences in particular. And so we've enabled that journey on our website. So you can either come to our website and look at the hotels and filter a couple different ways, or you can start with experiences and look at them or filter a couple of ways, or, you know, just go back and forth because obviously you're going to know which experience is tied to which hotel and kind of vice versa.
So we are very consumer facing today with our website, with our social media accounts, other than LinkedIn. And then we're spending pretty significant digital marketing dollars. We're doing display ads, like things that make sense to display ads, which we phase, you know, the, the, the visuals in and out, you know, every three months or so we're buying a ton of keywords to drive people to our website and we're doing ads and boosted posts on social. So we're doing all the, um, all of the kind of baseline things from a digital marketing standpoint. It takes time, obviously. No one knew who Curator really was from a consumer standpoint, you know, nine months ago.
So we're working really hard to drive traffic to our website and make the website experience interesting and good enough. So that people actually, we want them to move through our website and go to the hotel websites to book. We also want them to keep coming back because we do keep adding properties and we do keep adding experiences. So we're trying to create a situation where we have a whole bunch of unique visitors that come and some small percentage of them book, but we also have a bunch of repeat people who come back whenever they're dreaming about their next trip to see what's, you know, what we have to offer because you can look at almost 100 hotels and, you know, almost 90 experiences all in one spot.
[00:24:18] Susan Barry: We like to make sure that our listeners come away from every single episode of Top Floor with some practical and specific things to try either in their businesses or their personal lives. How should hotel operations leaders who are interested approach transitioning to the development and finance side of the business? I know so many people who are like excellent sales marketing revenue leaders who are just so interested in getting into development and there's no path. Do you have any suggestions?
[00:24:57] Jennifer Barnwell: Yeah, I, I think where I would start - so, you know, if you're at a certain property, if you don't already know, I mean, be inquisitive, like who owns this property? Like, what are the reporting lines here, who are the stakeholders here? And that could be questions really are directed at your, you know, direct supervisor. It could be, you know, go to your general manager and get try to get some time with him, and him or her. And maybe it's a mentor and you can kind of. Set some time aside to ask these kind of questions and help those leader, those leaders develop you.
I think that's kind of where it starts to understand kind of the lay of the land. Okay. Here's the stakeholders involved and then what is important to them? How can I, is it ever possible? I could get some face time with them. Are there any, you know, special projects or initiatives that come from the ownership group or maybe a third party asset manager that I can be involved in a run point on, or, you know, do all the work and the presentation for I think that's what I would say related to someone who's maybe at a property.
I would also add to that podcast like yours, you have like the most amazing people on it and it's a pretty wide range of positions and a lot of thought leadership and a lot of tips. I mean, you have these tips, right? Embedded in your podcasts. Podcasts are such a great, um, a great spot now to learn what people are doing and what they're thinking and to get advice from them. So I would definitely approach it that way too. And, um, I scout over LinkedIn a lot too. I mean, I guess maybe that's a third thing I would say is LinkedIn is such an amazing tool and resource and people are very, very, very active on it today. So you could add LinkedIn to that list to do three things.
[00:26:59] Susan Barry: I love those tips. I'm going to add one more because I can't help myself, which is to not be afraid to say to the asset manager who's coming to your monthly owners meeting or the owner, whomever it is, “Listen, I am so interested in what you do. Show me the way.” I think in my career, I would have been terrified to ever say something like that to say the wrong thing to the owner. Do you know what I mean? And I think now I just want to bang my head against the wall that I was too scared to do that kind of thing because I think asking questions doesn't make you look dumb. I think it makes you look smarter.
[00:27:44] Jennifer Barnwell: I am 100 percent every person, um, that I've worked with, you know, supervised or been in — I mean, I can't even now like countless property level meetings going through, you know, numbers and performance and renovations and all that stuff. My point of view in which I've always verbalized is ask questions. I mean, the young analysts that come and go here and at Pebble Brook, I've always been like, if I invite you to something or I take you somewhere, ask questions. That's the whole point. Or, you know, debrief with me after, you know, if it needs to be more involved. And I have had team members from properties, You know, reach out to me, you know, these very specific questions, like, how did you get into this? And why do you like it? And, you know, is there a path for me? And there absolutely is.
There's such a wide breadth of backgrounds of people that, you know, work in the ownership groups, but also there's so many third party asset management teams too. And my background here at Pebble Brook, when I was an asset manager was very different than, you know, the three or four others. And then when we combined with this LaSalle, we had like 10 asset managers. Everyone was very different. And that was actually a good thing because we could all learn from each other.
[00:29:08] Susan Barry: That makes a lot of sense. Okay, Jen, we've reached the fortune telling portion of the show. So you are going to have to predict the future and then we will hold you accountable. No, we will not. What is a prediction that you have about independent hotels?
[00:29:26] Jennifer Barnwell: Forever and ever. Independents and boutiques are here to stay. They're always going to be on the development landscape and they are absolutely without doubt the hubs of creation and ideation for our industry. Uh, but the second part of what I'll say is, uh, my prediction is because I do think that they're so special and they fill a very specific niche and there's so many people looking for amazing um, stays and experiences. I think they're going to be outperforming branded hotels.
[00:30:01] Susan Barry: Very exciting. That's interesting. Okay. If you could wave a magic wand and create any new product or service for the hospitality industry, it doesn't even have to be realistic. What would it be?
[00:30:13] Jennifer Barnwell: What I would say is that I would, maybe not in all cases, but I would like it available to actually pick the exact room I'm staying in. Just like you pick your seat on the airline, which I've been obsessed with for years. Like always knowing where I'm seated and have like everything all specifically set up and, and already decided for me. There, there - don't get me wrong - there is some technology out there that kind of exists in that realm, but it's kind of, far from fully adopted and I'll bet it out. But if, if we could be online, I don't know, maybe it's too much, but online and see like a 360 degree view of every single hotel, hotel room and pick our specific room, that would be pretty cool.
[00:31:02] Susan Barry: Oh, that's such a good idea. Do you remember, I think it was probably like around 2009, 2010, something like that. There was a site, I'm going to maybe get it wrong. So I'll correct myself in the show notes if I do, but I think it was called Room 77 or Key 77 or something like that. And they were crowdsourcing photographs of every single individual guest room in every hotel. Like that was their mission. Not exactly sure what happened to that company, but I will tell you one of the, uh, unexpected and positive byproducts was that, um, their cache, like their whole database of room photography was able to be used in some of the stop human trafficking efforts because you could compare to what the design of the room looked like and get a sense of where people were like, unbelievably cool. I just got chills even remembering that. Um, so I'm going to have to track that down. Hopefully they're still in business. Okay, folks, before we tell Jen goodbye, we are going to head down to the loading dock where all of the best stories get told.
Elevator voice announces, “Going down.”
Going down. Jen, what's a story you would only tell me on the loading dock?
[00:32:18] Jennifer Barnwell: So I think my approach to this is gonna be kind of in two parts. So um, I get the idea right of what we want to do here, but I'll say like a couple of quick things more kind of on the salacious side of things. It's like I was, I was thinking back of kind of some of my experiences and you know, there's things, I mean, there's just so many crazy things that happen in a hotel, right?
[00:32:43] Susan Barry: And it's sort of hard to pick one if you've had a long career, isn't it?
[00:32:43] Jennifer Barnwell: It is, um, but I'm going to end on a, a more kind of positive heartwarming note. Uh, so there's been things like, I mean, things you can't like get out of your mind and it's like, you know, I was involved in this one hotel and it was like, Oh my God, I even shudder to actually say it out loud, but you know, there was a, um, uh, sex toy kind of left behind and like way under the bed. And the room attendant did not see it or notice it. And then the next, um, the next occupant of that room was a family with a very small child that ended up with that and like playing with it and it just is like cringy and just like so upsetting and you're just like, “Oh my gosh, how did this happen? Let's not ever let this happen again.”
I also was an intern in college working. I'm not going to say the hotel or the management company, but a pretty, you know, well known big management company working in it at one of their hotels in the summer, like this, like, you know, some internship thing. And, um, the salacious thing that was happening was like, I mean, no one talked about it, but it was like, all of a sudden, in like the middle of the afternoon, the GM and his assistant would disappear.
[00:34:07] Susan Barry: No! How surprising! That never happens in hotels!
[00:34:13] Jennifer Barnwell: I was like, maybe 20. I was like, am I thinking — Cause like, you know, they would both come back like, noticeably disheveled and stuff. Do they think no one knows what's happening? Like we're smart people here. Um, but I'll, I'll end on a really heartwarming note because it just goes to, you know, maybe what I've mentioned a few times, just how, how special I think the people are that work in independents and boutique.
So, um, I live in the Washington DC area and my husband and I decided to get married in San Francisco cause he has connections there and then I was going there every month. I just loved it. And we got married at a venue, but we obviously we did room blocks, our hotels and some F&B stuff and parties at our hotels and the GM of the hotel where almost everybody stayed. Obviously I've been close with him. I was, you know, he was, he was my GM and I was the asset manager for a number of years. He just took such great care of me and like my special day, I had to ship my wedding dress. He received it. He had housekeeping completely steam it out. It was perfectly beautiful hanging in the closet when I arrived.
And he did, he worked the whole weekend that I got married to make sure everything went great. And even before that, I also just remembered. So it was a remote wedding and my husband was just like, it's fine. Like just take videos and pictures and let's just decide on things, but I'm not going to go on all these trips with you, these work trips with you. And so, um, he couldn't come to the tasting with the caterer in Napa. And my GM went with me.
[00:35:59] Susan Barry: Oh, wow. That is so cool.
[00:36:02] Jennifer Barnwell: He got us a SUV and we drove out to Napa where the caterer was based and we did all of this tasting. He was like right there with me as like my BFF and helped me decide and then did everything to make sure my wedding went off, wedding weekend went off without a hitch. So it's just, gosh, people that work in hotels are so special. I'll never forget that.
[00:36:21] Susan Barry: I know, nobody’s better than a hotel person.
[00:36:23] Jennifer Barnwell: I’m still in in touch with them today. He works at one of our hotels in San Diego. He's like an amazing human being. And I see him with my kids every couple of years. So it's all, it's all good.
[00:36:33] Susan Barry: I love that. That's so cool. Jen Barnwell, thank you so much for being here. I am certain that our listeners are intrigued by Curator and I really appreciate you riding up to the top floor.
[00:36:47] Jennifer Barnwell: Thank you for having me. This was so fun. Appreciate it.
[00:36:51] Susan Barry: Thank you for listening. You can find the show notes at topfloorpodcast.com/episode/150. Jonathan Albano is our editor, producer, and all around genius. He even wrote and performed our theme song with vocals by Cameron Albano. You can subscribe to Top Floor on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen. And your rating or review will go a long way in helping us give you more of what you like.
[00:37:27] Narrator: Thanks for listening to the Top Floor Podcast at www.topfloorpodcast.com. Have a hospitality marketing question? Reach us at 850-404-9630 to be featured in a future episode.