Interview: Edition Hotels' Dan Flannery

The first thing you notice about Dan Flannery, the senior vice president and managing director of Edition Hotels, is how he towers over you. And then it’s his infectious grin and easy-going nature. The unassuming hotelier joined Marriott in 1981 at the age of 18, at the opening of the original Gaithersburg Marriott. And from bussing tables in one restaurant and waiting tables in the other, he’s now grown to helm the operator’s luxury boutique brand, Edition Hotels.

Edition has been around for 10 years — it was a decade ago that the brand was announced, with the unlikely partnership between Bill Marriott and Ian Schrager coming to pass. In 2009, Flannery was named vice president and managing director for Edition. In collaboration with Schrager, whom he calls a creative visionary, Flannery developed the team, the culture, the platform, and systems for this new brand and launched the first hotels.

However, the relationship between Marriott and Schrager took time to bloom. With the first few hotels announced in the wake of the recession, a pipeline of more than 30 was reduced to just three. That was when Flannery made a surprise move. He left Marriott in 2011 for Morgans Hotel Group; at the time he had been with Marriott for 30 years, and people thought he was joking about leaving. And while he was heading up Edition, he was, he admits, impatient.

“It was right after we had opened the first couple of Edition hotels and in 2010 we had a pipeline — between signed deals and leads — of over 30 hotels. We saw all but three of those disappear in the recession. It went from something that was going to be quite a challenge to get open, to opening two hotels in tough economic time in the industry, with not necessarily a great pipeline for the future so I got a bit impatient,” he admits.

But the return was worth it, he says: “What really made it interesting was that by then the company had really invested in New York, Miami, and London, with Marriott’s own money, and really done a great job at making those hotels be flagships of what the brand could be and that created a lot of interest from developers.”

So now, the brand is coming into its own. “We have seven hotels opening in six countries next year,” says Flannery, ticking off the locations: Shanghai, Abu Dhabi, Times Square (New York), Bodrum, West Hollywood (in California), Barcelona, and Bangkok. Not just that, there are 16 in the pipeline, set to open over the next few years. These 16 hotels are set to have 92 restaurants between them, and Flannery says Edition is competing in the rare space of being a luxury lifestyle brand, with a focus on food & beverage and nightlife.

And no wonder: Flannery grew up through the Marriott system working in food & beverage, before he took on his first general manager position in 1999. So F&B is important — both to him personally, and for the Edition brand. The first few years of opening an F&B concept, if done right, will lead to profits and revenue generation, he stresses. And in the current digital age, it’s even more useful. “It’s what gives your hotels personality and gives you the opportunity for a lot of PR and social media exposure. People will write much more about or post on Instagram what happens in a bar or restaurant than what happens in a room.”

Product is everything, both to Schrager and Flannery. Flannery tells Hotelier: “Our focus is on creating a really compelling product. Ian’s a believer that if you design a quality product then you can charge quality prices.” Design, he says, is part of the equation, as are high quality restaurant/bar concepts, activation space and service execution.

“When I first started talking to Ian Schrager about Edition, one of the things that became very clear to me is that he had a real sincere intense focus on restaurant and bar business because of its importance in creating a personality of the hotel. You can’t create energy in the hotels through a rooms business, you can’t witness it through the banquet business but you definitely can through the restaurant and bar business. So it’s central to the identity of the hotel regardless of what the margins are,” he says.

F&B will definitely play an important role in the brand’s Middle East debut. Edition is gearing up to launch here with the Edition Abu Dhabi in 2018. The 200-room property is located in the UAE capital’s Al Bateen Marina, and Flannery hopes this will be a prime spot from where to capture the both the tourists (leisure and business), as well as the local community — especially important for a lifestyle hotel with an emphasis on a buzz and vibe.

Flannery doesn’t give away much, saying the brand is “notoriously secretive” prior to opening, but teases that apart from the architecture, the F&B is something to look forward to. He says: “There’s going to be three restaurants where we’re partnering with a culinary partner; he’s pretty acclaimed and we’ll announce that later this year. He is on board to partner on three restaurant concepts, and then there are five other food & beverage venues in that hotel, so pretty significant F&B.”

He reveals in a throwaway comment that the operator hopes to open “later next year, we hope before Formula One”.

The heads of departments are already on board, Flannery reveals, and he adds: “We look for people who have passion, and who really embrace the culture. Culture is probably over-talked about but it’s about getting people who are going to be fanatical about the brand. For us, the service strategy is being a luxury brand but also being a lifestyle brand. And it’s focused around culture, and training the staff well.”

The general manager has previously worked with Flannery at Morgans Hotel Group, but also has experience in the UAE: Stefan Soennichsen. Heaping great plaudits on Soennichsen, Flannery adds: “There’s nothing more important in a hotel than a general manager that really gets that culture and builds trust and inspires people, and gets people excited about what they’re doing.”

Even more tight-lipped about the Edition Dubai, Flannery says that that property is meant to open at the end of 2019. 

He’s confident there is a demand for products like Edition in the UAE, and adds: “There’s an interesting analogy that Ian uses from the movie business: there are tens and thousands of movies made every year but there’s always a market for a great movie.”

Further afield, he thinks the region is a great platform for future expansion. He says he could see Dubai having the potential for more than one property, and also says Bahrain is a great place for the brand to potentially open.

He notes: “I’m a big fan of Bahrain and the hospitality market there is great, and the nightlife is more vibrant than I thought it was. So that’s certainly a possibility for us. We also have an exciting project in Bodrum, Turkey that will be opening soon.”

Of course, the Edition brand now sits within Marriott’s portfolio of 30, after its acquisition of Starwood Hotels & Resorts. But Flannery reveals the merger has had less impact on the Edition team, which still sits in the Meatpacking District of New York. But, he concedes, the merger has had its benefits — with ramifications on its F&B, deals with OTAs with better bargaining power, and of course, the loyalty programmes.

He says: “It’s interesting, I’ve always had something I wanted to do more than what I was doing in the current job, and now it’s good to say, ‘I can’t imagine there’s anything that I want to do more than the job I’m doing now’. I look at the job that I’m doing, especially when I came back to it after doing an earlier incarnation, so I feel like I’ve been training my whole professional career for what we’re about to do with Edition now.” We can’t wait.