When longtime maritime and cruise industry executive Oneil Khosa, the former CEO of the Margaritaville at Sea cruise line, was looking for a vacation spot away from his busy work life, he bought a small boutique hotel instead of purchasing a second home.
Casa Morada in Islamorada in the Florida Keys was that property, and Khosa, over an eight-year period, purchased five more boutique hotels in off-the-beaten-path locations. The group of properties make up the Enthusiast Hotel Collection, for which he serves as CEO.
He acquired his second property, A Stone’s Throw Away, a 10-room retreat in Nassau Bahamas, because “my ship sailed to the Bahamas,” he pointed out.
The others include the Hartstone Inn in Camden, ME, a 22-room hotel that was originally built in 1835; the Brewery Gulch Inn and Spa in Mendocino, CA, which is adjacent to the 48,000-acre redwood-filled Jackson Demonstration State Forest; the Historic Tapoco Lodge in Robbinsville, NC, located in the center of the mountain region of Nantahala National Forest in the Great Smoky Mountains; and Cap Cove on the island of St. Lucia, which features 74 individually decorated beachfront suites and townhomes.
The Brewery Gulch Inn and Spa is adjacent to a redwood-filled forest.
Originally, the properties were intended to be personal investments with “no commercial angle,” Khosa said, but “when I quit Margaritaville at Sea in October, I put the pedal to the metal because I really had the time.”
He named the group Enthusiast Hotel Collection because every hotel has an enthusiast following. He said of the Historic Tapoco Lodge, “It has a passionate following of bikers and fast car drivers because it’s located at the beginning of the road known as the Tail of the Dragon,” an 11-mile span featuring 318 curves that attracts thousands of bikers and drivers each year.
The Florida and St. Lucia properties attract fishing and boating enthusiasts, while the Maine and California hotels are popular with hiking enthusiasts walking the trails of the nearby forests.
“We call ourselves travel-inspired hospitality,” Khosa noted. “All our properties are located two to three hours away from either a major metro or a major airport. Most of the travel is either to forests, alongside oceans or on scenic roads.”
These hotels also give guests a chance to disconnect when they get there, as well as when they take the road trip to the unique destination.
“In today’s world, you can go to a nice hotel on Miami Beach, but I don’t know how much can you disconnect,” said Khosa. “But if you’re driving to the Keys to Casa Morada, or driving from Atlanta to Tapoco Lodge, or from San Francisco to Brewery Gulch Inn and Spa, you get into a car with your partner and get some quality time. For example, when you travel from San Francisco to Mendocino, it’s one of the most beautiful drives. You go through Addison Valley and Santa Rosa, or you can go along the coast.”
Two of the properties—the Brewery Gulch Inn and Spa and the Historic Tapoco Lodge—have unique construction stories.
“Brewery Gulch Inn and Spa was built out of redwood that was submerged underneath the rivers around the forest,” said Khosa. “A hundred years back, redwoods were chopped and all the logs were put in the river.
They would come to the mouth of the river, where they got shipped out. A lot of these logs got submerged in these rivers, and the hotel was build out of that wood.”
Historic Tapoco Lodge has a connection to a movie from the ’90s. “The lodge was built in 1932 during the construction of the Cheoah Dam, which Harrison Ford jumped off of in ‘The Fugitive,’” he said. “Tapoco Lodge served as a makeshift accommodation for the builders of the dam.”
Enthusiast Hotel Collection recently partnered with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in an effort to educate guests on the importance of birds to our everyday lives.
“I don’t think it’s top of mind that a lot of our food depends on pollination that happens because of the birds,” said Khosa. “The lab communicates to the world that birds play a very critical role in our existence. So, through the partnership, we make sure there’s a great emphasis on birding in our locations. We conduct birding tours in the area, and we’ll have charts in our hotels explaining what birds you can see and where you can find them.
We also have enough hiking gear so that if you have to travel to see a particular bird, we have the gear for you.”
Since there are other types of enthusiasts to attract, Khosa said he is looking to expand to hotels located in golf and ski towns.
“We’re looking at properties in Denver, Maryland and Sedona, CA,” said the former cruise executive. “There is a lot of interest in these locations for experiential hospitality.”
