104 – TMG Hospitality Trailblazers: Thomas Magnuson

Suite Spot: A Hotel Marketing Podcast

*DISCLAIMER* Thank you for listening to the Suite Spot. During episode 104, you will hear slight audio distortion due to a disrupted signal connection at the time of recording. We apologize in advance and hope you enjoy the episode. Host and Marketing Director Ryan Embree and Tom Magnuson of Magnuson Hotels take time to reflect on and analyze the past of the hospitality industry while providing hopeful foresight for the future. They discuss many relevant topics for hoteliers, which means there is no shortage of content and information from this episode. Suite Spot Podcast · 104 - Hospitality Trailblazers: Thomas Magnuson Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check in and we check out what's trending in hotel marketing. I'm your host, Ryan Embree. Okay. Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of The Suite Spot. This is your host, Ryan Embree, and we are today continuing our TMG Hospitality Trailblazers series. Very excited about the special guests that we have on today. For those that might be just listening for the first time. This is our second series 2021. We really highlighted hospitality heroes, those individual workers that were going above and beyond during the pandemic and sharing their stories on this podcast. In 2022, we're looking towards the future and we're talking with some of the best and brightest in our industry, the people that are paving the way forward and really trailblazing our industry as a whole. And with me today, I think I have a great guest that can speak to that because, he's got a global foot mark on his brand, Mr. Tom Magnuson, the co-founder and CEO of Magnuson Hotels Worldwide. Tom, welcome to the Suite Spot. Thomas Magnuson: Thank you, Ryan. It's great to be here and to, visit with all of our friends out there who are in the hotel industry. Ryan Embree: Yeah. And one of the questions that I love to ask, because we have such different answers, is everyone's journey through the hospitality industry. Now, it's not every day that I get to interview someone who founded a brand like Magnuson Hotels. So walk me through that journey, you know, where you started in the hotel industry and ultimately how you founded Magnuson Hotels Worldwide. Thomas Magnuson: Well, I'm gonna compress about 55 years into about, into about 30 seconds, Ryan. I have a very interesting background. I started working for my father and my grandfather in a small motel, in a little mining town, Wallace, Idaho, up on the Montana border when I was eight years old, I think I just said. So I got a really unique insight, hands on into running and living and breathing, small business ownership of an independent hotel. I spent many years, you know, in the family company, like many people do, you know, working every single job there is. You, do what has to be done, did every job in the house, you know, waited tables, cleaned rooms, front desk, grinded keys in the basement when you had actually actual keys in the old days. But quickly through that path, as the years went on, when I was in actually, in my forties, I came back to help my father retire and he had a handful of hotels still and asked me to kind of package these up for the next phase. And part of that was becoming a Best Western franchisee, a great global company, but it really articulated the struggle of a small, unique hotel to be heard in today's world. And what we found being a franchisee, a unique minded hotel, and a unique market being a franchisee is the struggle of maintaining your identity versus the weight of sameness. That's been perpetuated for, you know, 50 years since, you know, the big brand started coming out with Hilton in the 1950s. And it's also the difficulty of being heard and bein...