Intrepid Travel is venturing into lodging with an acquisition strategy that aims to improve the way its travelers experience hotels and accommodations on Intrepid trips.
Intrepid has added two hotels in the past three years in Australia and Vietnam. It acquired the 15-room Daintree Ecolodge in North Queensland, Australia, in late 2023, and it recently entered into a three-year lease agreement with the 19-room Hoi An Field Boutique Hotel in Hoi An, Vietnam.
It also has a 50% joint venture with Australia-based off-grid accommodations company CABN.
In June, Intrepid hired hotel industry veteran Celine Hurelle to lead its expansion into accommodations. Hurelle spent 24 years at Accor, where she was most recently global head of the Sofitel brand.
At Intrepid, Hurelle is tasked with working with executive leadership to identify opportunities to acquire accommodations that support the company’s ethos of responsible travel.
Matt Berna, Intrepid’s president of the Americas, said expansion into hotels is something that co-founder and chairman Darrell Wade “has wanted to see become part of the business for the last 10 to 15 years, and now we have the resources and momentum to look into it properly.”
Berna said Intrepid’s accommodations strategy is based on the notion that hotels are an important but sometimes overlooked aspect of travel that can, at times, be a “mediocre, negative or not even a memorable experience.”
“So how do you take something so vital to travel and make it a much more enriching, immersive experience?” Berna said.
Intrepid said it will focus on acquiring hotels in destinations where it does the most tours. Some properties will retain their identity and branding, and some properties will be co-branded, bearing the Intrepid name or logo alongside the hotel’s name.
A hotel with an established customer base that’s popular with locals might retain its brand identity, such as a traditional riad in Marrakech, Morocco, which Berna said the company is close to acquiring.
In the U.S., Intrepid is planning to first target the Pacific Northwest for hotels. Berna next year will transition out of his current role and into senior vice president of U.S. sales and operations. He will lead this effort as part of Intrepid’s new growth strategy for North America.
Glamping properties and eco-resorts are high on the list because “they can become part of our trips,” Berna said.
The hotels would serve as preferred overnight accommodations for Intrepid’s tour guests, but they would also be bookable for other travelers.
One of Intrepid’s goals is capturing new customers. Owning a hotel that largely has its own brand identity and frequent guests could help familiarize those travelers with Intrepid and what it has to offer.
More important is offering an authentic local experience for Intrepid tour guests.
“We’d love to see a place where there’s a restaurant downstairs that’s highly rated by locals,” Berna said.
An unusual move for a tour operator
Intrepid is doing something relatively rare for a tour operator, according to Robert Cole, lodging and leisure analyst at Phocuswright.
The investment risk is typically quite high for vertical integration in general; success in hotels requires a specialized team with the right skill sets to lead strategy — and, of course, a lot of money.
German tour brand TUI may be the most prominent operator that has several verticals, owning travel agencies, hotels, cruise lines, retail shops and a handful of European airlines.
Education First, which includes the EF Go Ahead Tours brand, has its own accommodations vertical, primarily language school campuses that offer housing. While these properties are typically used for its educational travel customers, including students, the company said its leisure tour groups also use some of the 50 properties it has around the world.
A&K Travel Group also has a presence in accommodations. The luxury travel brand owns Sanctuary Retreats, which operates safari lodges in Africa and South America and river cruises in Egypt for guests on Abercrombie & Kent tours.
For Intrepid, going deeper into this competitive business is where Hurelle will come in. Intrepid said Hurelle has deep experience from her work at Accor in various senior roles in several countries — including Australia, France and Thailand.
“It’s a really interesting industry. It’s also a very competitive industry; it’s very easy to get it wrong,” Berna said. “So we have a professional, a general manager who has spent years as a strategic leader in this part of the business.”
