How This One-of-a-Kind Hotel Shattered All Expectations in Grapevine

When Tom Santora first looked at the projections for his new property in Grapevine, he thought there was some kind of mistake. The year was 2020, and his company – Coury Hospitality – had just finished the bitter work of furloughing most of their hotel staff in Kansas and Oklahoma. Now, his boss had handed him a seemingly contradictory spreadsheet with pandemic-influenced staff cuts and projections for the first year… but a pre-pandemic pro forma into year five. Their new multi-million dollar, event-and-dining-driven boutique hotel would open with roughly one employee for every four guest rooms.

“We were putting together, let’s call it our ‘stub year budget’ – our September through December budget for 2020 – that’s how you’re going to build your staffing model,” said Santora, who came to Grapevine as the General Manager of Hotel Vin but now serves as the company’s Chief Growth and Strategy Officer. “I put together a number and Paul Coury said ‘you’ve got to take that number back. Tom, people are not coming to the restaurants…’ it got to a point where I was thinking ‘why are we even opening?’ The numbers were so low. And we still talk about this a lot, to be honest with you, it always comes up because I bring it up: we exceeded the entire quarter’s budgeted revenue in the first weekend. It was nuts. We only had 25 people opening the hotel; today we have 170 people there!”

As you might have guessed from the sextupled workforce, downtown Grapevine’s one and only hotel didn’t just survive it’s opening year. It exceeded every expectation, propelling Coury Hospitality into a new phase of growth and setting the tone for public-private partnerships in Grapevine.

More Than a Train Depot

From the outset, Hotel Vin was an ambitious project. Grapevine’s City Council selected the Autograph Collection Hotel from a crowd of peer projects seeking to develop a four-acre plot of largely vacant land adjacent to a planned-but-incomplete passenger rail system. Most companies wanted to build something less grandiose and more practical, with a higher room count and lower overhead. That’s never been Coury’s style.

“All we do is lifestyle hotels. We’re actually the biggest operator of Autograph for Marriott, which gives us more flexibility when it comes to designing a hotel. You know, if we were going to be a Marriott, the actually have: ‘Would you like Package A, B, or C? Or you can mix B and C by changing a chair.’ [Being an Autograph Collection Hotel] gave us the ability to sort of do whatever we wanted,” said Santora, referencing the special collection of properties within Marriott’s portfolio that offer an elevated experience alongside a unique look and feel. With Hotel Vin, Coury proposed to lean into the wine culture that fuels Main Street and GrapeFest while adding a few more strategic innovations to the wish list included in the City’s call for proposals.

“The City had already decided it was going to be a train station; this architectural beauty. A Visitor’s Center would be there. Coffee. Maybe buy some flowers, wait for the train. That space is huge! It’s like 25,000 square feet. Our position with the City was that this probably wasn’t the highest and best use for the space. Have you ever heard of food halls?”

As part of the planning process, leaders from Coury Hospitality went on field trips with select members of the Grapevine City Council, observing and exploring all the pros and cons of the emerging food hall format. At the time, the concept of placing multiple small vendors under one roof was gaining tractions in major markets across the United States, but it hadn’t yet penetrated into DFW’s suburbs. 

“We had, probably, four or five different hoteliers come in and pitch their presentations. But there was just something about the innovative ideas that Coury Hospitality had and the others didn’t. You want a business to come in that has more exciting ideas than you have, and they did,” said Councilwoman Duff O’Dell. “There was a lot of concern about how a little hotel downtown would work, but it’s worked very well. I never walk in there and it’s not packed with people.”

Like many success stories, Hotel Vin and Harvest Hall look like obvious winners in hindsight. After all, any food and beverage concept that can survive a launch in the COVID-restricted winter of 2020-2021 must be doing something right. But at the time, the project’s $28 million price tag called for some innovative funding.

Funding the Immaculate, Down to the Last Detail

To get the deal across the finish line, the City of Grapevine offered a $2 million incentive for Coury Hospitality, broken into portions that would offset early costs and pay back others through revenue sharing over time. That number accounts for around 7% of the initial cost estimate, but a smaller share of the final development price. Importantly, none of those dollars came out of the City’s general fund.

“We had a Tax Increment Finance (TIF) District that paid for part of it, we had a private partner that paid for part of it, we had a Convention & Visitor’s Bureau funded by Hotel Tax that paid for part of it, and we had Trinity Metro, who were financially obligated to pay for half that station,” said City Manager Bruno Rumbelow. “Those things came together in a way that gave us the financial capability – without affecting the General Fund, which is an important way in which we run City government, because that’s where the ad valorem tax dollars are and where most of the sales tax goes – we did not use any of that money. We didn’t have to. The fact that we had those other buckets really meant that we could elevate this project in a way that maybe you wouldn’t have done if the source of revenue was different.”

Nothing less than an elevated project would do. In order to build a functional hotel without reaching the City’s required 200-room minimum, Hotel Vin had to qualify as a Boutique Hotel; higher-end, with features drawn from and complementary to the surrounding neighborhood. But their dedication to detail went beyond ordinance. It’s part of the company’s DNA.

“Our customer, I would call them the Individualist. Somebody who is looking for something different every time they travel or go to a restaurant. They like the design, they want to see when something is different or special,” Santora said. “And it’s little things! Little things like lighting, sound, temperature, scent; all those little components are really what make up the overall experience. And you notice it – it’s funny, you don’t notice it when you go to Vin – but you notice when you don’t have it at another establishment... all the chairs are pushed in, everything looks right, everything is in place. That’s what makes it feel right, but they don’t know that’s why it feels right.”

One of the brand’s core values is a commitment to activating every inch of available space; a policy they’ve put into practice in the form of a rooftop bar, a hidden speakeasy, and a private wine club with its own proprietary faux cave. Hotel Vin’s ‘experience curators’ even help to boost portions of the property that don’t directly belong to them: under the condominium agreement on the site, the City of Grapevine retained ownership of Harvest Hall, the second-floor meeting spaces above it, and a portion of the attached parking garage. Coury runs most of the vendor booths as a contractor, leaning into another one of their specialties: Food and Beverage.

Where the Locals Go

Perhaps the most unique aspect of the business plan at Hotel Vin is its relative agnosticism regarding guests. For most hospitality providers, the key metric is “heads in beds;” industry shorthand for high occupancy rates and large numbers of travelers who book a room for one or more nights. Make no mistake: Vin boasts one of the better occupancy rates in the local market, in part because it’s easier to fill 120 rooms than, say, 1,500. But, according to Santora, a stay at Vin starts long before anyone is thinking about sleep.

“Part of Coury Hospitality’s secret sauce is around activations; making sure we’re entertaining. There’s live music, there’s events, there’s wine dinners, bourbon tastings, mixology classes. Those take a ton of work, but I think that’s what keeps people coming back; giving people a chance to try something different. We like to lead with food and beverage and happen to have rooms,” he said.

“Typically, at a hotel, maybe 10-15% of business in the restaurants is locals. It’s mostly the business traveler, maybe leisure travelers on the weekends. At Hotel Vin, 75-80% of our business is locals. You can go in there on a Tuesday night and literally everybody at the bar is a local. None of them are staying here… we want to lead with that culinary, lead with those activations. Oh, and you can sleep here, too. You know, when you think about the business traveler, they want to go where the locals are when they go out at night. It's actually your hotel!”

From the constant programming to the intensification of anything mundane, Hotel Vin strives to create something special for every guest. Wine enthusiasts will be charmed by their partnership with Riedel, which ensures that every ounce of red or white comes in a glass designed to enhance its flavor and presentation. Adventurers can pick from a slate of special events and hidden spaces in which to forge lifelong memories. And business travelers, though they may arrive by Taxi or uber, almost always take TEXRail back to the airport once they see how easy it easy to navigate the station next door.

Together, those elements have made Hotel Vin such a rousing success that Coury Hospitality moved its headquarters to Grapevine and recently announced an expansion alongside a new line of hotels modeled on their groundbreaking property here. Anyone looking at the raw numbers could see why.

 “Our first full year beat our fifth year pro forma, which is unheard of,” Santora said. “When I joined the group and I saw that pro forma – some of the rate expectations, a lot of times, are just throwing out big numbers just to get the deal done – and I thought those numbers would be a stretch. To exceed that in the first year was really great to see.”

For a more in-depth understanding of this project, check out ‘Growing Grapevine’ on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or your favorite audio streaming service. You can also subscribe to our monthly newsletter or find us on Facebook and LinkedIn to stay up to date on major developments around the City.