Ennismore Top Boss Sees Impact of Great Merging on Lifestyle Hotels and Co-Working

With Accor‘s backing, Ennismore has been building out lifestyle hotels and co-working spaces that have benefited from travelers increasingly blending their business and leisure trips, called the Great Merging.

“Hotel owners like the diversification of revenue,” said Ennismore founder and co-CEO Sharan Pasricha on Tuesday at Skift Global Forum in New York City. “At our hotel [The Hoxton] in Southwark, you’ve got 40 percent of revenues coming from rooms, 30 percent from F&B [food and beverage], and the rest from coworking.”

Accor and Ennismore last year created a lifestyle entity based in London and jointly led by Pasricha and Gaurav Bhushan, CEO of Accor’s lifestyle division. Ennismore’s 14-hotel and co-working brands include Hoxton, Gleneagles, SLS, Delano, Mondrian, and Working From.

Ennismore entered co-working as a logical extension of guests and visitors working in the lobbies of its hotels. Its first attempt was offering a space with 800 desks adjacent to one of its hotel in the Southwark district of London. The average length of stay has been nine months. The space now has a waiting list of 400, Pasricha said, and a similar space in Chicago is “sold out.”

Pasricha told Skift CEO Rafat Ali that a key ingredient to win customers is through food and beverage, and Ennismore “incubates” about 40 brand concepts made up of chefs, mixicologists, designers and other hospitality experts.

While in June Accor announced it was in talks to sell an 11 percent stake in its Ennismore joint venture to a consortium of Qatari investors, the $195 million (€185 million) transaction hasn’t closed yet.

One possible new segment for Ennismore in the future might be festivals, Pasricha hinted.

Of all the world’s regions, Pasricha believes North America offers the biggest opportunity for the group.

“It could become our biggest market,” Pasricha said.