The Verdict: Omni Leader Comes Home with Steve Keenan

Well, thank you for having me. It's a real honor and a privilege for me to be on this morning and be able to talk about our property.

It's been interesting. A lot of local patronage of the hotel. We've learned a lot about our operation. Our food and beverage outlets in particular have been a little bit busier than we had originally anticipated, which is a good thing, but we've had to adjust our staffing and increase our staffing in a lot of different areas and adjust the way we had planned on doing things. Things are going very well, very positive, a lot of good indicators.

Sure, absolutely. I grew up in Tulsa. I attended Oklahoma State University. I knew I wanted to get into a business-related field, and found that Oklahoma State University had a hotel and restaurant administration school, and I thought that was really a neat, special, selective business entity to study and pursue. So I went to Oklahoma State, I graduated, and I started my hotel career at what was then the Westin Williams Center in Tulsa. I believe it's now the Hyatt Regency hotel. I spent two years working at the Westin Williams Center and transferred to Kansas City with the Westin there in Kansas City, and spent about seven years. Had a lot of wonderful opportunities at that property in Kansas City. Then I joined Omni Hotels and have been with Omni Hotels for 23 years now. I've moved around quite a bit. Never thought that I'd have the opportunity to come back to Oklahoma, but I feel very privileged to have the opportunity to come back to my home state and introduce this great brand, Omni Hotels and Resorts, to Oklahoma, to Oklahoma City. Again, we just have a wonderful brand, we have a great product, we have a great service level, and so I'm very excited to be in my home state and being a part of this great hotel.

Absolutely. Besides its former mayor... Go ahead. That's right. Yeah, well, you know, Mick, you played a large role in this. You're a visionary, and it led to the hotel and the convention center coming to fruition. But it really all started in the 90s, prior to our current ownership even purchasing Omni Hotels and Resorts, with the MAPS program. The MAPS program really paved the way for where we are today. Our company and ownership recognized that Oklahoma City had a lot going for it, that there was a vision, and that we could really make a mark in Oklahoma City and ensure that we had an opportunity to make Oklahoma City a destination in the convention industry. And so that's what we're doing now.

Well, family's good. I came up here in February. I relocated from Corpus Christi. I was the General Manager of that property for seven years, and so we had been in that city, in that state of Texas, for quite a while. I came up in February. My son was finishing his senior year in high school. So I came up in February. My family came up, my family being my son and my wife, came up in August. We moved into our home in September. My son is now enrolled at the University of Oklahoma, and my daughter, my middle daughter, is still in Corpus Christi pursuing her master's degree. She's attending Texas A&M University Corpus Christi. And my oldest daughter lives in Dallas with her husband and son. So anyway, we're here in Oklahoma City. My wife just told me last month that she's very happy here in Oklahoma City, and I think it's important to say because we had been in Texas and in Corpus Christi for so long. We were very involved in the community, and it was kind of tough for my wife to pick up and leave. But she loves it here in Oklahoma, and we're happy to be here. And you know what they say: if mom's not happy, nobody's happy. And so it's nice to say that we're all happy.

Sounds good. I guess we're getting those up. The hotel looks a lot like Kent is... Well, you can, as you start to talk about it, 17 floors, is that right? 17 floors. Seven food and beverage outlets are just an item of interest. Our 17th floor was designed with NBA teams in mind. We have higher door frames and wider door frames. We have California kings in each of the rooms on the 17th floor. We have higher, you know, taller shower heads. And so we're really working with the NBA right now and trying to secure the teams that travel into Oklahoma City to play the Thunder, and we're trying to secure that business at our hotel. And so far, the feedback has been very positive.

That's correct. We are directly south of the Chesapeake Arena, right across the street, and we're just directly north of the brand new convention center. And of course we're adjacent to Scissortail Park. And of course the streetcar is right across the street from our hotel, one of the stations that'll take our guests and convention-goers to some nightlife areas in Bricktown and of course the Midtown area. So we are in what we consider to be a perfect location here in Oklahoma City.

Well, we have 605 guest rooms. Our maximum occupancy in a guest room is four people. Of course that doesn't happen on a consistent basis, but you know, in the thousands, I mean literally the thousands of people, a couple thousand people in the hotel at a given time once we get our legs under us and the convention business rebounds is not out of the question.

Sure. Well, we touched on the fact that we have a prime location here in Oklahoma City that's accessible to all areas of town and nightlife. But one of the biggest features of our hotel is the fact that we have so many amenities that our guests can enjoy. As I touched on, once we're fully open, we'll have seven food and beverage outlets available to our guests. We have a full Mokara Spa, which is located on our third floor. It's a full spa with a manicure, pedicure, hair styling station. We have eight treatment rooms, including a couples treatment room. We have a dining area in the spa. We have male locker rooms, female locker rooms, as well as a full relaxation room. Also on the third floor is our pool area. It's a huge outdoor recreation area. It's a Las Vegas-style pool area, if you will, complete with cabanas, has a hot tub and a fire pit, as well as a full bar and grill that's located right next to the pool. So having said that, we also have the Oklahoma City Tap House, which is a two-story sports bar, and then we also have our Bob's Steak and Chop House, which is our fine dining prime steakhouse, and our Park Grounds coffee shop, a Starbucks-style coffee shop. And it's all on the west side of the building, easily accessed from outside. But I mentioned all these amenities because truly a guest can come to our hotel for a weekend and not leave and find a lot of activities and restaurants and food and beverage options at their fingertips. So it's truly a destination for staycations, if you will. And so we think that's going to be very popular as we work our way through the pandemic. It's already proven to be so with our weekend business really peaking with a lot of local patronage, as I mentioned earlier in the show. But once we open up our pool deck and the weather is more conducive to outdoor activities, and Scissortail Park starts having their events, we think the staycation business is really going to carry us through the summer months, leading up towards the third quarter of the year where we really start seeing group business picking up. We are a convention hotel. We do rely on the group convention business here at this hotel on the property. And so third quarter, fourth quarter looks like we gained some ground as far as the group business, and then the future years look very positive. So we're very encouraged by that. But truly, it's a hotel you can check in and you don't have to leave when you have everything at your fingertips.

Well, with the pandemic, it was uncharted territory, if you will. We did virtual hiring through a website, and it's very similar to what we're set up right now with Zoom. And we did a mass hiring hall virtually. And so a lot of the HR directors from around the company participated so that they could help us funnel through the applicants. And when we launched it and advertised it, we had over 500 applicants that responded, that we had interviews lined up with, again virtual interviews. And those people that were selected, that we were interested in, we brought in for in-person interviews. And out of the gate, we hired just under a hundred hourly associates through that program. And since then, we've been hiring just normally, as far as applicants showing up to the hotel, and we've grown our hourly associate roster from under 100 up to close to 130 right now, just as we've seen the increase in business volume that we really did not anticipate. So far, the opening's gone very well, and we're very encouraged by what we see in the Oklahoma City market.

Oh, absolutely. First, let me say that you'll see a lot of local and regional inspiration incorporated into the design throughout the hotel. What I mean by that, you'll see a lot of natural textiles like stone, leather, and metal throughout the hotel, especially in our lobby. And as far as inspiration, one of my favorite inspirations is the fact that our wall lamps in all of our guest rooms resemble an oil pump jack, which is really cool. We have oil pump jacks obviously throughout the state and of course on our capitol grounds. But you also see the chevron pattern, kind of the chevron pattern, throughout the hotel that resembles the scissortail flycatcher bird. And you'll see that incorporated into our ceiling, in our carpeting, and some of our millwork and in the boardrooms. You'll see little hints of that throughout the hotel. And I bring that up just to let viewers know that that kind of transpires over into our food and beverage outlets. In the Tap House, which is our two-level sports bar, we have kind of an upscale bar food menu. It's very good, feedback's been very great from our guests. But it's very Sooner, Cowboy, Thunder themed, very Oklahoma. And then you transfer over to the Bob's Steak and Chop House. You'll see the Oklahoma flag, and there's a flag indicating that our state was the 46th state in the nation. And you'll see a cattle of course, and you'll see some pictures back in the old land rush days at the booths in the restaurant. So a lot of tips of the hat to Oklahoma heritage and Oklahoma's history throughout the building.

Sure. Obviously the pandemic has really thrown our industry for a loop. And as I mentioned, I was here in February working at a remote office kitty-corner to where we are now, and it was just me and the sales team leading up to the third and fourth quarter where we really started hiring on managers. And we saw our company shut down almost. It was really some scary times. We saw a lot of our hotels were closed because the larger hotels that rely on group business, there's no group business coming from March and April. So they literally shut the hotels down, and we saw a lot of our friends, I've been with the company 23 years, so a lot of people furloughed. And our company actually went from roughly 20,000 employees to just a little over 1,800. So it was some very, we learned a lot about what needs to be done and how to move forward. Fortunately, we have an ownership group, REI ownership family actually, it's one family that owns our company, and he was committed to Oklahoma City and our project continued. So again, our group business as we went through the year, we weren't very successful in booking group business. The key for us here in Oklahoma City right now is we need to bring the convention planners and people that influence the convention business into Oklahoma City so we can show what we have. And we have so much going for us in Oklahoma City. And the key is to bring those people in and really tour them, show them our property, show them the beautiful convention center we have next door to us, so that we can really start growing the convention industry here in Oklahoma City. So the pandemic has been a big setback for us. We're really starting to plan.