Full Video: MCR CEO Tyler Morse at Skift Future of Lodging Forum 2023

Tyler Morse, Chairman and CEO of MCR Hotels, revealed that his company had acquired about 70 hotels and two software companies during the pandemic when he spoke at the Skift Future of Lodging Forum.

Morse expects more good hotel investment deals to emerge because he predicts interest rates will decrease again because of potential banking contagion. MCR is set to close on four hotels this week and has 12 more in the pipeline.

In the discussion with Skift founder and CEO Rafat Ali March 29, Morse said he owns 150 hotels in 37 states and operates under 17 different brands, including the iconic TWA Hotel at JFK Terminal 5. That makes MCR the third-largest hotel owner in the U.S., Morse said. Morse also discussed why he's a fan of airport hotels and why Residence Inn is one of his favorite brands. (You can watch a full video and read a transcript below.)

MCR has also invested in hotel technology to improve the industry's software systems, which Morse finds lacking. It has acquired two hotel technology businesses, StayNTouch and Optii, and it has a "pipeline" of other investments.

https://youtu.be/B-QAYdjvzLk Interview Transcript

Ali: All right, folks. Now comes the best or worst part of the day. You guys will decide. The next two interviews are mine. This is the Rafat hour, the last hour left for the day. So thank you for staying. Thank you for being here. Two very different conversations to come, one from… You don't like to be called a hotelier. We're going to talk about why you don't like to be called hotelier. But hotel owner, investor. And then the last one is Catherine Powell, who's the global head of hosting for Airbnb. Couldn't be more different in terms of businesses, but obviously there's a lot of commonality. Lodging, which is staying of humans, is definitely the common part. So thank you Tyler for coming. You obviously don't have business currently in Europe.

Morse: Working on it.

Ali: Working on it.

Morse: Trying to change that.

Ali: Trying to change that. You're the third-largest hotel owner in the US.

Morse: Correct.

Ali: That happened over the pandemic. You took a contrarian strategy of going all-in, buying hotels when the whole industry was shut. So explain your contrarian strategy there first and why.

Morse: When there's blood in the streets, that's when you should be buying. This is not some Nostradamus-esque philos