ResortPass CEO Believes There's Massive Untapped Revenue In Hotel Amenities

Forbes

Forbes Women Editor Maggie McGrath sits down with Michael Wolf, CEO of ResortPass, a company that allows anyone to book a "day pass" to a hotel's amenities, like pools, spas and gyms—all without needing to stay overnight.   Wolf outlines his vision for the marketplace startup, and how he feels travelers' behavior will only increase demand.    Subscribe to FORBES: https://www.youtube.com/user/Forbes?sub_confirmation=1  0:00 - Introduction: What is Resort Pass? 1:17 - Unlocking New Revenue for Hotels 3:00 - Does This Dilute a Hotel's Brand? 4:10 - Who Uses Resort Pass? The 3 Main Customers 6:07 - More Than Just Pools: The Rise of Day Rooms 8:20 - How We Work with Hotels (and Make Money) 10:14 - Managing Seasonality & Our Global Expansion 11:58 - Solving the Hotel Industry's 'Antiquated' Tech Problem 14:38 - The 'New York Hustle': Our Approach to Growth 16:16 - My Hiring Secret: The 'King of Back-Channeling' 19:14 - Lessons Learned from My Time at ClassPass 21:59 - Our Biggest Challenge is Creating a New Category 24:06 - Why Hotels Won't Cut Us Out of the Process 26:15 - Our View on AI: Offline Experiences Become More Valuable 28:56 - Our Hiring Philosophy: Incredible Craft & Good Human Beings 32:21 - What's Next for Resort Pass?  Fuel your success with Forbes. Gain unlimited access to premium journalism, including breaking news, groundbreaking in-depth reported stories, daily digests and more. Plus, members get a front-row seat at members-only events with leading thinkers and doers, access to premium video that can help you get ahead, an ad-light experience, early access to select products including NFT drops and more:  https://account.forbes.com/membership/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=display&utm_campaign=growth_non-sub_paid_subscribe_ytdescript  Stay Connected Forbes newsletters: https://newsletters.editorial.forbes.com Forbes on Facebook: http://fb.com/forbes Forbes Video on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/forbes Forbes Video on Instagram: http://instagram.com/forbes More From Forbes:  http://forbes.com  Forbes covers the intersection of entrepreneurship, wealth, technology, business and lifestyle with a focus on people and success.

Transcript

00:00Hi, everyone. I'm Maggie McGrath, Senior Editor at Forbes.

00:07Fewer Americans plan to travel for their vacation this year, but joining us now is the CEO of a

00:14company that could provide an alternative solution. He is Michael Wolfe. He is the CEO

00:19of ResortPass, a company that gives people access to resort amenities for a fee without

00:26needing to stay overnight. Michael, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. So I just

00:31kind of gave the elevator pitch for ResortPass, but how would you describe what you do? Yeah,

00:35so ResortPass enables day access to the hospitality industry. So you're not staying overnight at a

00:40hotel, but you can use the amenities, things like pools, cabanas, spa, fitness, wellness,

00:44even the rooms just for the day. And the underlying premise is that there's a lot of excess capacity

00:49within the hotel layer. So hotels are so smart when it comes to revenue management, yield management

00:54of the room product, but they've never applied those same lessons to the rest of the hotel.

00:58And that's where we come in. How much does it cost? Like if I want to go to the one hotel that's just

01:04south of Central Park, what would that cost me? Yeah, so there's a real range of prices. We work

01:09with over 2,200 hotels and we work with all of the leading hotel brands. So we work with really

01:13accessible hotels that could start at $25 and we work with some of the more luxury hotels that could

01:17be 200 plus per day. And how much does this add to the hotel's revenue? How creative is it?

01:24It's incredibly creative. And the reason being is that hotels have really gotten to the point

01:28where they've maximized room prices. So for anyone who's traveled recently, room rates are kind of at

01:32the all-time highs, but hotels don't really have a way of now increasing their revenue beyond that

01:36because they've gotten to the point where they don't really even think that they can push room

01:39rates that much higher. So hotels are now saying, hey, how do we monetize other spaces in the hotel?

01:44And I think they look at the airline industry with a lot of jealousy. So airlines have monetized every

01:48square inch of the airplane. Of course, if you've flown, whether that's the luggage,

01:52whether that's the food and beverage, internet, and essentially hotels have never done that.

01:58Now, the cool part is, for what we do, is that the insulate revenue we generate is great for the

02:03hotel, but it's also great for the user. So the airline, you're probably not that happy about those

02:07kind of additional fees. Whereas for us, what we do is we're creating this new consumer experience,

02:11which we could talk more about, which is really different versus kind of what goes on in the

02:15aviation industry. I was going to say, I've heard you use that airline analogy in other interviews.

02:19And as someone who flies a lot, I resent every last time I'm nickel and dimed by the airlines.

02:26And in fact, I'm loyal to one brand specifically, so I don't have to pay for my seat, so I don't have

02:31to pay for that extra baggage or the internet or everything that has a price tag to it. So is there

02:37a possibility that charging people for day access or pool access could be dilutive to a company's brand?

02:45I don't think so. And remember, even at the most luxurious hotels in the world today,

02:51people might come in who are not staying at the hotel to have a drink at the bar or maybe eat at

02:56the restaurant or maybe go to the spa. And today, none of those hotel guests who are staying

03:01overnight necessarily are worried that the person next to them is not staying at the hotel. In fact,

03:05I would argue it's accretive to the experience because when you travel, you really want to engage

03:09with kind of what's local and what it feels like to be authentically there. And I think having more

03:13people who are local actually increases that. Are the local residents your consumer or is it the

03:20folks who are in Airbnbs and just want the pool? Or I've heard you talk about folks who they check

03:25out of a hotel, the flights not until much later. I think we've all had that experience and then

03:29you're kind of stuck. Is it equal among those constituent groups? It is. It's actually, yeah,

03:34so it's all those use cases. And I think that's a surprising piece about the business is that we are

03:39this local experience. And on the local side, what I love to think about is we all walk by and drive

03:44by hotels every single day. And we just assume as a local that there's not really a way for us to

03:49interact deeply with those properties. And yet, and this is the actual statistic, 97% of people who

03:54stay overnight at a hotel will stay at that hotel once in a lifetime. And yet you might live down the

04:00block or a few miles away and could have a much more ongoing relationship. So that's kind of the local

04:04use case. And then the traveler use cases, you talk about Airbnb, every day 3 million people check

04:09out of an Airbnb. And where do they have to go? It's 11am, their flight out's not until 10pm. Instead of

04:15sitting in an airport all day, they have this bonus day of their vacation. So it really is split amongst

04:19both kind of use cases, both the local use case and when you're traveling. But the central core that

04:24unifies all of them is this incredible day of rest and recharge. And that's really what the consumer

04:29brand stands for. There's not a single platform out there that stands for that single day

04:34and that feeling. We like to talk internally of the vacation brain, the idea of that you're going

04:38away without getting away. And that's kind of what ResortPass really stands for.

04:42I'm interested in the day use. I've definitely done that traveling for work. You go somewhere,

04:46you're on an Amtrak for several hours, you want to refresh, and you just want a few hours in a hotel.

04:50Are people using ResortPass for that?

04:53They are. We have a property here in New York City, the Hilton Midtown, and they've done a really great job

04:58of branding, I think, what they do. So they have this day room and the ability to kind of use a room

05:03for a recharge for the day. But they've done it in really specific ways. So they have a shop and

05:08drop package. Let's say you're shopping in Midtown, you want a place to rest for a few hours,

05:11maybe leave some of your bags. Or they have a pre-Zigfield Theater package. And the Zigfield

05:16Theater is this beautiful theater. And maybe you're living in Connecticut, you work in Midtown,

05:21and you want a place to take a shower and change for your night out having a show at the Zigfield.

05:25So people use it a lot, actually. That's one of our fast-growing parts of the business.

05:29So was that something that the Hilton Chief Operating Officer came up with and then you guys

05:34met? Or was this you met with their executives, you pitched ResortPass and came up with these

05:39packages? Yeah. So a lot of times the ideas are kind of collaborated between the hotel brands and

05:43us. And in Hilton, where we have a very deep relationship, they actually came to us and said,

05:48hey, can we do a bigger play with the rooms for the day? And we see a lot of excess capacity,

05:53even though a hotel could be sold out. But there's a lot of the hours in between where the hotel rooms

05:57are empty. And that's, again, an asset that's unutilized. And so we've kind of started launching

06:02a lot more rooms for the day with Hilton and many other brands. What are the conversations

06:06like with the hotel brands? Are you getting inbound interest or is it you approaching them saying,

06:10hey, this could add 10% to your revenue? Yeah, it's both. It's both our kind of an outbound

06:16motion and an inbound. As we've grown, there's been a lot more inbound. So a lot more hotels are

06:20reaching to us. And again, we now work with every major hotel brand in the United States,

06:25just to give you a sense. Every major flag we work with. And I think the reality is that hotels

06:30love the revenue. And they don't just love the direct revenue we're sending. But our guests spend

06:35a lot on food and beverage as well. Because remember, our guests are by definition coming

06:40for the day. So the overnight guests might stay on premise of the hotel, but they often go off

06:45premise. Our guests spend more money actually at the hotel than the overnight guests, because their

06:50whole purpose of being there is to spend all their time on the property. And the reality of all this

06:56is that the hotels see our revenue not just as incremental revenue, but incremental gross margin

07:01or even bottom line. Gross margin for them. But what are the margins like for you at Resort Pass?

07:06Yeah, so we're a marketplace. So we just have a take rate. So we basically generate the revenue,

07:10send the vast majority of that to the hotels, and we keep a little bit for ourselves.

07:13Are you profitable?

07:14We're profitable many months of the year. We have a little bit of seasonality to our business,

07:18but we're still focused on growth right now, you know, over just profitability.

07:23So talking about seasonality, I frame this conversation with Americans traveling less

07:27this summer. Is summer your big season? Or is it actually shoulder season that's more popular?

07:32Yeah, so summer season is our biggest season of the year. But what we're seeing is we have less

07:36seasonality every year to the business. And the reason being is that we're doing more and more across

07:41the hotel surfaces. So we started and what we got known for largely is around the pool,

07:45but we're doing a lot more with spa, which example is a year round. So you actually

07:49picks up a little bit in the winter or the rooms for the day or programs and activities that happen,

07:54as well as geographic expansion. So as we go more into the southern hemisphere, their summer

07:58obviously is our winter. So it mitigates the seasonality.

08:01So I think I heard you say earlier this year that you add 100 hotels a month or what's the growth rate?

08:07Yeah, yeah. So we add 100 hotels every single month. Like I said, the hotel relationship we have

08:13is incredibly strong. I've been in marketplace businesses for 20 years and grown many different

08:17categories. What is so incredible about this is the hotels just want to go deeper with us. And the

08:22reason why is that 95% of the hotels we work with have never offered day access. So by definition,

08:28we're creating fully incremental revenue, and they love it because we get to handle all of it for them.

08:34And so there's kind of really, it's what I love about the business so much is that it's so

08:38accretive to the hotels and to the user.

08:40Now, you mentioned the southern hemisphere. And again, I framed this conversation about

08:44Americans traveling, but how global is your business?

08:47Yeah, so 90% of the business in the United States, 10% is in an additional 30 countries.

08:52We're seeing a lot of our strongest growth in a lot of those countries. And you'll see us kind

08:56of expand even more globally into 26.

08:59How important is that given what we've heard from the Trump administration about tourism and a

09:04potential tourist fee for international travelers?

09:07Yeah, so I think the good news is so much of our business is local. So no matter what

09:10happens with the people actually getting on airplanes, we have so many people who can enjoy

09:14the product locally. And so we see strength when the economy is good, and we see the strength

09:21when the economy is a little bit more trouble.

09:24Are you a canary in a coal mine for the overall economy, do you think?

09:28I don't want to claim that. I would just say that what we do know is that there's so many

09:33more people who travel locally than get on planes. So a lot of times people get really caught

09:37up in the TSA numbers and some of those other statistics. And that's great. But exponentially

09:41more people are actually getting in a car to travel. And that's often our audience.

09:45Now, you mentioned the capacity of a hotel in a given day, you have people checking in,

09:51checking out, there are hundreds of rooms, this feels like a dynamic pricing solution,

09:57perhaps for resort pass. Can you talk about the technology that that underlies everything you do?

10:02Yeah, so you know, the whole hotel technology side is incredibly antiquated. So when you go to a hotel

10:07and you check in, sometimes they're they're type in for like 20 minutes, what are they doing?

10:11It's because it's built on MS DOS from like the 1970s. And so when we created the product,

10:16we didn't just have to go out and create a consumer app and consumer brand, we had to create the entire

10:20technology stack for the hotels. So when you go check in at the hotel, they're actually using our

10:25software to check you in set pricing, launch dynamic pricing, which we just launched for the industry as

10:30well. Now, the good news is the hotel industry is very familiar with dynamic pricing. In fact,

10:34they largely invented it for the rooms. We're now applying that to the rest of the surfaces of the

10:39hotel. But the fun part is we get to launch dynamic pricing now with all the lessons learned from

10:44different industries. So it's a really unique way and with a really receptive audience, meaning the

10:48hotels who really understand dynamic pricing. So the William Vale or anywhere else in New York that has

10:53a rooftop scenario that someone might want access to, is that something that I would see as a consumer

10:59is a little more expensive on a Saturday or Sunday versus a Tuesday or Wednesday?

11:03Often. And again, just reflecting what the demand is. But I think what's great is that there really

11:08can be a real variance. And one of our whole premises of the company also is that people

11:12don't take their time off. You know, in America, our crisis is not that you aren't given enough

11:15vacation. Sometimes people look and, you know, we get so much less vacation than Europe. That's not

11:19the issue. The issue is that people don't take it. And so I think what's really accessible about

11:23ResortPass is that we enable the single day, you know, to take that single day off. And so you can

11:27really take advantage of maybe Tuesday when the pricing is more accessible.

11:31If you can actually manage to take that time off, I am culprit number one when it comes

11:34to not taking my vacation. Now, let's talk about growing. We've been talking about growing. But

11:39as CEO, how do you think about growing while also balancing profitability? And how do you

11:45communicate that to your team?

11:46Yeah, I think about growing intentionally. So we're building a category, super ambitious. I've

11:50been doing startups for 20 years. This is what I do. This is what's fun. But I also think

11:55that being in New York, you have a mentality of growing a real business. So I love the West

12:00Coast and startup world out there, but I think they approach things a little bit differently.

12:03I think in New York, we're a little bit more focused on, again, creating great businesses

12:06and large businesses, but doing it in a little bit more sometimes of a rational way. Now,

12:11that might result in sometimes the businesses in New York being a little bit smaller than

12:13the West Coast, but I think they actually have a higher likelihood to be successful because

12:17just there's a New York mentality around these other industries, you know, like finance,

12:21like law, like retail, CPG, that are constantly thinking, like, we have to create a great business.

12:26So you're not just surrounded by tech. And I think that actually winds up leading to a

12:30really strong result in the way we built here in New York.

12:32That's some fighting words against colleagues on the West Coast. That's really interesting.

12:37And when you talk about building a tangible business, hiring is a big piece of that.

12:42You said you spend 70% of your day thinking about hiring. Is that correct?

12:46Yeah. You know, hiring, there's nothing that ultimately helps successful companies more than

12:51the people. And so I really get to know people deeply. And that's both through the process and

12:56interviewing and various people on the team, obviously meeting folks. But it's also in spending

13:01a lot of time with people who've worked with them in the past. You know, in an interview process,

13:04you get to work, you know, meet someone, spend maybe a couple hours with them max. But if you

13:08have the opportunity to talk deeply to people who've spent years working with someone, it's such a

13:13valuable data point. And so 70% of my day, you know, many days, sometimes even more is spent on

13:18hiring and recruiting.

13:20You called yourself the king of back channeling. So is that those conversations with the colleagues

13:25of the folks you might be hiring?

13:27Yeah. And it's really just to get a better sense of who the person is. You know, a lot of times,

13:32you know, just as it might be with a friend or someone else that you know, like when you first meet

13:36someone, you're not always seeing the full version of who they are. There's nothing malicious about

13:41that. It's just sometimes people are a little bit more guarded and what have you. And you can learn

13:45so much more again, by by also speaking to people who work with people in the past. So that's

13:49incremental. Again, we spend a ton of time with candidates as well. But I find it incredibly

13:54valuable.

13:55What does that afford you spending so much time on the front end of hiring someone? What are the

14:00returns you're seeing after they come on board for you having spent so much time?

14:04I think you're a little bit more likely to be successful in hiring. It doesn't mean you're going to be

14:09a hundred percent. I think especially the speed startups move, if you are achieving a hundred

14:13percent success in hiring, you're probably moving a little bit too slow. So there's a little bit of

14:18a balance there. But I think the key is, you know, you really want people coming in where they have

14:22no expectations on day one in either direction. So you don't have any surprises and they don't have

14:27any surprises. I think that's like what makes for a really good, you know, hiring and onboarding.

14:32You've mentioned your experience in startups. You were head of operations at ClassPass during what I

14:37would probably describe as the heyday of ClassPass, right? 2014 to 2018. What have you taken from that

14:43experience to your current role?

14:45Yeah, that was a really exciting time to be a part of that company. I had been advising the

14:50founder and she asked me to come on board to help scale the company with her. And that was really

14:54during the heyday of, I think, boutique fitness. And what we saw there is that there was a ton of

14:57excess capacity as all these individual studio owners opened up studios and ClassPass allowed for,

15:02you know, to help fill up some of that underutilized inventory. I think what I really

15:07learned and why I really love ResortPass is the incredible relationships we have with the hotels.

15:12Because sometimes there was friction in those days because of the relationships with the fitness

15:17studios. Because we were essentially disintermediating the existing user behavior.

15:21Someone could go to a fitness studio directly. Whereas now with ResortPass, 95% of the hotels have

15:26never offered day access. So by definition, the user that's coming is incremental. And, you know,

15:32incremental revenue. My favorite example of this is I was at one of our properties in Las Vegas.

15:37It's a very Las Vegas analogy. And our lead contact there said to me, he's like, I love

15:43opening up ResortPass every day on the B2B side, on the software side, because it's like a slot

15:48machine. And I see what free money I get. And I think that kind of is a little bit the mentality

15:52of the hotels. I see it as an incredible second revenue stream to their overnight guests.

15:57That's interesting. I was going to ask you about a ClassPass pain point that I've heard from

16:00studio owners, which is that folks are coming, they're taking one class, and they're not converting

16:06to the loyal users that I think some studio owners wanted or hoped for when they signed

16:12on with ClassPass. But that kind of challenge isn't present with ResortPass because there's

16:18no existing user base for this.

16:20Exactly. And, you know, I think you see this. I think if you read our reviews, what's so magic

16:24is not just people have this day of rest and recharge in this moment with their friends and family,

16:27which is the most fulfilling part of this whole journey for me, but it's that they didn't know

16:31they could do it. So by creating the category, there's this extra moment of beauty and serendipity

16:36for the user, because not only do you have a great experience, you didn't even know this was a thing.

16:40If we go outside right now on Fifth Avenue, out of 10 people, three people will have heard of

16:44ResortPass. And those people will be like, oh my God, I love ResortPass. You know, I use it.

16:48The other seven, you explain, we enable day access to hospitality. The reaction is going to be like,

16:52I didn't know you could do that. That's great. I would totally do that. But they don't know it exists.

16:55And so ultimately, our biggest challenge at ResortPass is we're creating a category. And

16:59that's both the opportunity and the challenge. So how much of your time that's not spent on

17:03hiring is spent on educating consumers? And how much is it on the hotels themselves to be

17:09advertising these services? Because I would say, I think I've heard more from you than I have the

17:13CEO of Hilton, that something like this is available. Yeah, I think a lot of it is on the consumer

17:18education. You know, as a marketplace, you're constantly trying to think about, there's really three

17:22sides of a marketplace. People often think there's two sides. There's the supply side. So in this

17:26case, the hotels, the users, in our case, our customers. But then there's us. We have to make

17:30sure it works for like all sides of the triangle. And I like to make an analogy that over time,

17:34it has to be an equilateral triangle. There has to be equal value to all parts of the triangle.

17:37But at various times, you can give a little, it could be an obtuse triangle or an acute triangle.

17:40You can give a little bit more value to different parts of those three. Right now, I think we're

17:45spending a lot of time on the user side, because we have incredible hotel relationships.

17:49We have 5x the number of hotels we work with just in the last two and a half years. So we work with

17:54all the major properties in the United States and 30 countries. And now we're kind of getting even

17:58more of the word out to spread it. But we have, we've sent, you know, 5 million people to hotels

18:02and we're growing every single day. What's your white whale of hotel chain that's not yet on Resort

18:07Pass that you would just dance in the streets if you signed on? You know, there's individual

18:11properties within the larger brands that we don't yet work with. But, you know, genuinely,

18:16you know, really fortunate to work with the leading hotels in the world.

18:19This is accretive to hotel chains. They're seeing the value proposition. You have this

18:25hotel in Las Vegas. He says it's like free money. Do you fear that he looks at that free money and

18:31says, actually, I don't need to be paying Resort Pass to do this. I could build this myself.

18:36A hotel's core business is filling up overnight rooms with people who are from out of town.

18:42Our core business is filling up every other space of the hotel with locals. So hotels have to focus

18:48on their core business because that's where the vast majority of the revenue does come and will

18:52continue to come. And we're providing a different user, a different experience, a different checkout

18:57flow. And the hotels don't want to focus on it is the reality. And that's actually a benefit to them

19:02and it's a benefit to us. You know, even their hotel website real estate, they have to focus on

19:07filling up the rooms. That is their core business. And so they can't devote it to, you know,

19:11kind of the day guests. But that's kind of what's really nice about this one is that it's really

19:15incremental, but it doesn't kind of make them distracted from their core business.

19:20So you don't see a scenario in the future where you're just cut out of the process.

19:23No. And in fact, we have gone only deeper with our hotels. So we've announced relationships with

19:28some of the large hotel flags, you know, MSAs with some of the largest brands in the world.

19:33And we're going to continue to announce a few of those later this year.

19:35It's an interesting point about the websites that you raised, because

19:38I will eat at some restaurants that live within a hotel. And the number of clicks it takes to get

19:44to either the reservation or the menu is astounding to me. Are you solving for that very specific

19:51pain point? A little bit, because, you know, we are. Because ultimately, again, they have to be buried

19:55because they have to focus on their core business. And that's filling up hotel rooms. The way the

20:00Wall Street focuses on it, the valuations of hotels, the ownership groups, everyone is focused

20:04on how many rooms are filled and at what rate. And so that's what's so beautiful about our

20:09business is it's incremental revenue. And that's why, you know, again, that example in Las Vegas,

20:13where they look at it as free money, because they're not really having to do any work,

20:17but they're getting to see a lot of the benefits of it. And one last thing I'll mention is they

20:20also love that we're putting people physically into their hotel. What's the hardest thing of any

20:24business to get someone to physically walk into a business, whether it's a retail business,

20:28a hotel, a gym, whatever it might be. And we're helping them do that. So it's often happening.

20:32You'll see this as well is we're really showing off that property. So maybe next time you have

20:36a guest in town, you now have a relationship with the hotel and say, hey, you should actually

20:39stay at this local hotel. I go there all the time. It's great. Or maybe when you're traveling

20:43and you're checking out at the Airbnb, maybe on the next time you're going to say, hey,

20:47this was a great hotel. I'm going to stay there. And we see that in our data, in our reviews all the

20:51time. So it really winds up becoming a little bit of that billboard effect.

20:54That's a fair point, because I have often said that as a New York resident, I never know where to tell

20:58people to go because I don't go to the hotels in the city that I live in. Now,

21:02we talked about dynamic pricing. How much does AI play into that? And if not at all,

21:07how do you think about AI in your business?

21:10Yeah. Like many technology companies, we're at the point now where AI is basically being

21:14infused in every part of our business. So whether that is on the code stack and kind of engineering

21:18tools, whether that's in marketing and helping us develop copy, whether that's in some of our sales

21:23training. But the reality is the most important part in relationship with AI for us, I think about

21:28in a world with AI is that people are going to want to be offline more and people are going to want

21:32these rest and recharge experiences. So I'm not contrarian to AI and how we use it internally,

21:37but I think ultimately about our offline experience, this moment of rest and recharge we provide,

21:41that becomes even more important in the future than maybe ever before.

21:44As you think about the evolving pieces of AI, I mean, AI at large involves so many specific

21:51pieces of technology that you could apply to your business. You could either contract out or you

21:55could build within. What's your strategy when it comes to that?

21:59Yeah, we're doing a little bit of both. There obviously are incredible tools now that kind of

22:02can be universally applied and we don't need to out engineer for an engineering tool or what have you.

22:08But there are things that we're developing internally as well around the areas that we

22:12specialize in. So, you know, as a reminder, day access didn't exist before us. And so the result

22:17of that is the entire data layer, for example, of day access is within our control. So we have hotels

22:23calling us all the time asking us for data about different market clearing prices for access to the

22:28pool or a cabana or a spa. And that's fascinating to me because in the hotel industry, there is so much

22:33data about the room product, but it's never applied to all these other services. We're developing

22:38it. And so there's a lot that we can do with that data model that we're working on right now.

22:41And it's changing at a rate that can sometimes be distracting. How do you know when it's time to

22:47implement a tool versus wait and see versus just ignore entirely?

22:51Well, I think the speed of it, the real result for me on that is retesting some of the tooling.

22:56So there's a tool in the CRM world that we tested a year ago. It wasn't ready. It really didn't add

23:01enough value. Now it's more relevant for us. And so that's, you know, I think it's really being

23:05open-minded that the same thing that didn't work maybe 18 months ago might be prime time now for

23:10us. So we kind of go through that cycle. Oh, that's interesting. So that requires some

23:13flexibility. It's not like you make a decision once, but you kind of have to return to it again

23:16and again. Going back to hiring, you mentioned you want the world's best talent. How do you

23:24control for that? Yeah, I don't know if I can control for it, but I invest in it to get as close

23:28as I can. And so when I refer to world's best talent, I want to be clear what that means to me and us at

23:33resort paths. It's people that are incredible at their craft, whatever the discipline that is,

23:37whether that's marketing or engineering or product management, and a good human being.

23:42And it has to be both. And I think sometimes, you know, our hiring process might be a little slower,

23:47but it's because we haven't violated either of those. You know, at the end of the day,

23:51it is nothing but the people, you know, and I sometimes sit in one of our offices in our office

23:56a few blocks away from the studio. I often get the most fulfillment and the most satisfaction when I look

24:02out and I see how much people are enjoying working with each other. And the only way to get there is

24:07to hire the world's best talent because they have to be incredible to craft because people really need

24:10to respect each other no matter what their discipline. But they also have to really just

24:13like sit next to one another. And I think we've achieved that. How do you do that? Do you watch

24:17how they interact with wait staff or is it that amount of time that you're spending with them?

24:21I think it's the amount of time that we're spending with candidates. I think we always run through an

24:25exercise. So we see a little bit more like what it's like to work together. And we also, again,

24:30spend a lot of time getting to know people who've worked with them in the past. I also think I

24:34really gravitate towards people who've been through the startup journey before. You know,

24:37there's people who have not been through startups who obviously can thrive at startups, but you don't

24:41know. But if you've been through this once or twice, you generally know that and you keep going

24:46back to it, even when it's probably not the most appealing career path always, you kind of know that

24:51person, you know, has it in them. A lot is difficult about a startup environment, including the rate

24:58that the company culture can change. Have you seen the resort pass culture change as employee

25:03count has grown? I think, you know, I took over the business three years ago and we've made a

25:10little bit more of a centrality to New York. And I think we're a New York based company with a New

25:14York hustle, with a New York energy and a New York speed. And I think I probably instilled a little

25:19bit more in the company. We have people who we have a number of remote employees as well that

25:23we're super supportive of. But I think we've brought a little bit more of a New Yorkness to

25:27the company. And New York company through and through. If we were to sit down one year from now

25:32in summer 2026, Lord knows what the weather will be or what the travel trends will be.

25:37What would you hope to report to Forbes that you and resort pass have accomplished in that time or

25:42are working on this time next year? Yeah. So there's this feeling we give people a rest and recharge

25:47and there's nothing that's more fulfilling than reading our reviews and hearing from people on the

25:51street and in LinkedIn and emails that I get about that. And we've done that for 5 million people.

25:57We're going to do that for many, many more. I won't give us exact projections, but I think that

26:01number would be exponentially higher by next summer. And is the long term goal an IPO or to be privately

26:06held for the long term or to be acquired? Do you think about that right now? I don't. I really focus

26:11on growing a category. We are the earliest stages. When we look back on hospitality and we realize that for

26:17years people didn't think about the day guests, we collectively will think that's crazy.

26:21And so I'm changing that right now. Michael Wolff, thank you so much for sitting down with Forbes.

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