Following its acquisition by Highgate in 2022, Viceroy Hotels & Resorts, the luxury brand with hotels in the U.S., the Caribbean & Latin America and Europe, has unveiled a brand relaunch and a renewed focus on experiential travel.
“When Highgate acquired Viceroy, we discovered that a significant amount of the marketing dollars were spent on the individual properties, but there wasn’t a lot of marketing or emphasis behind the brand as a whole,” said Mark Keiser, president, development, Viceroy. “That gave us an opportunity to determine what we wanted the brand to be for the next 25 years.”
Viceroy at Ombria Algarve in Portugal
It was time for the brand to evolve with the trends in luxury travel, he said, and that included focusing on the changes in the guest experience.
“Over the last five years or so, guests have really begun to crave the experience more than what the property has to offer,” he said. “They want a taste of what it is like to be in Mexico or Portugal or Hawaii, as opposed to seeing everything through the eyes of the brand. We want to provide true experiences that would be hard for guests to organize for themselves.”
Mark Keiser
Viceroy Hotels & Resorts
For example, he mentioned that the family of one of Viceroy’s associates in Portugal owns a honey farm. Viceroy at Ombria Algarve takes guests to the farm, equipping them with beekeeper suits, and they can explore the area while surrounded by 10,000 bees.
“Whether you come back with a little jar of honey that you made or not, you’ve had an experience of what it would be like to be a bee farmer,” said Keiser. “We also have about 200 acres of adjacent land where sheep roam, and guests can spend half a day with a shepherd.”
With its array of property types and locations, from a mountain chalet in Snowmass, CO, and an “ultramodern” property in Los Cabos, Mexico, to a hillside village in Portugal, he said that what ties the brand together, from property to property, “are really the experiences that we curate for our guests.”
Viceroy currently has 10 hotels and four residential properties in its operating portfolio. The Harriman, a Viceroy Resort, in Ketchum, ID, near Sun Valley, is expected to be the next ground-up property to debut, with a planned opening in June 2026. The resort is named in honor of W. Averell Harriman, the chairman of the Union Pacific Railroad, who built and opened the Sun Valley Resort in 1936.
“The property is topped out, and work inside the building has begun,” said Keiser. “Sun Valley has a stronger summer season than the winter season, and for the resort to be fully operational for next summer is clearly our objective. This will be the first luxury hotel to open in the market. It will feature 73 hotel rooms and a dozen residences, some of which will be returned to a rental program, as well as a spa; a coffee shop/equipment shop that we expect to be a social hub; and a restaurant where a local resident could eat two or three times a week.”
He noted that Viceroy has signed a deal for a “small, jewel box property” in New Orleans, adding, “That’s a market that is so rich with history and will give us the ability to really lean into the experiential side of our brand.”
The company also has plans to convert hotels within the Highgate portfolio to Viceroy properties. “We have properties in New York and San Francisco and have looked at some hotels that we own in Dallas and Boston,” Keiser said. “There’s a big appetite internally to convert existing properties that we already own, either with our partners or by recapitalizing them, to Viceroy hotels.”
In Europe, Viceroy at Ombria Algarve is now operating in its first summer season after opening last October, and Keiser said the brand has additional properties in the pipeline in Portugal, as well as hotels in Italy, Greece and the U.K.
“There’s also a pipeline of opportunities in the Middle East in the U.A.E., Qatar and Saudi Arabia,” he said. “In Mexico, we have two properties today and are planning to enter Mexico City and a couple of other resort areas.”
The residential side of the business is also booming, according to Keiser. The Peréz family, which was involved in the development of Viceroy Brickell, The Residences in Miami, have signed on to develop two standalone residential projects in South Florida.
“We also have projects in Fort Lauderdale and Clearwater Beach, and we’re about to launch sales on a project in Mexico,” he said.
Viceroy Hotels & Resorts is not considered a subsidiary of Highgate but rather an affiliate, noted Keiser, who pointed out that his company has access to Highgate leadership, as well as IT and accounting resources.
The executive explained that the growth plan for Viceroy is to continue to expand in the Americas and Europe, with new properties in the Middle East and Asia-Pacific in the future.
“We have a pretty good runway ahead of us before we start running into saturation-type issues, but we want to concentrate on building out the best portfolio of luxury lifestyle hotels,” he said. “We want them to be designed and programmed according to what is locally relevant and at a consistent quality level, with experiences being the thread that ties the properties together. We have not just great partners in the principals of Highgate on operational expertise, but they also have proven to be very savvy investors. We intend to own a substantial number of Viceroy hotels, and for that, the ball is just started rolling.”
