What Makes a Hospitality Brand Endure With Sean Dee

Sean Dee is the Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer at OUTRIGGER Hospitality Group, a Hawai'i-based company specializing in iconic beach resorts across the globe. He leads the company's global commercial strategy across marketing, sales, revenue management, brand, and distribution. Sean was named HSMAI's 2022 Corporate Marketing Professional of the Year and serves as Chairperson of the Hawai'i Visitors and Convention Bureau, having also served on the HSMAI Americas Board of Directors. His leadership roles at Levi Strauss & Co., Hard Rock International, and Anschutz Entertainment Group shaped his expertise in brand reinvention and hospitality innovation.

In this episode… Enduring hospitality brands do not survive change by abandoning who they are. They evolve by returning to what made people care in the first place, then deciding where to grow from there. Sean Dee, Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer at OUTRIGGER Hospitality Group, has run that play twice, first reviving Hard Rock International and now repositioning OUTRIGGER. Kin Sio sits down with Sean on The Lights On Podcast to break down how brands endure.

When Dee joined Hard Rock in 2003, the brand was ten straight years into decline and had drifted into a museum, an academy, and Hard Rock food served on Delta flights. His team tracked down the original founders, Peter Morton and Isaac Tigrett, to understand what the 1971 London cafe was actually built on, then rebuilt the brand around one ownable idea: delivering experiences that rock. They widened the music from a narrow hard-rock genre to hip hop and other genres, opening the brand to younger, higher-spending guests. Dee estimates the enterprise value grew to roughly six times what it was when the turnaround began.

At OUTRIGGER, Dee applied the same discipline. He narrowed the company from a mix of airport hotels, mid-market flags, and the three-star Ohana brand down to beachfront Outrigger Resorts, positioned where local culture meets world-class hospitality. Under KSL Capital Partners, which acquired the company in late 2016, OUTRIGGER now runs 31 properties, including 13 beachfront resorts across all four major Hawaiian islands plus Thailand, the Maldives, and Mauritius. As Chairperson of the Hawaii Visitors and Convention Bureau, Dee also makes a pointed case on tourism: the problem was never the 10.4 million visitor peak, but the tens of thousands of illegal vacation units operating in residential neighborhoods, while visitors already contribute a billion dollars a year in tax revenue.