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Sonesta Cuts Corporate Jobs as $2 Billion Bid Puts 68 of Its Hotels in Play
Sonesta International Hotels has begun laying off corporate staff across marketing, loyalty and other departments, less than two weeks after an investor offered $2 billion in cash for the hotel portfolio it operates for Service Properties Trust.
The reductions at the hotel group began last Friday and have touched communications, marketing, loyalty, quality assurance, training, food and beverage, and accounting. At least nine employees have posted about their exits on LinkedIn, and one staffer described the cuts.
Sonesta's chief brand officer departed in recent weeks, while marketing and creative personnel have left since Friday, according to their own public posts. The company has not publicly detailed the size or scope of the restructuring.
The layoffs follow an unsolicited $2 billion all-cash offer from TKO, a hotel investor based in South Dakota, for the entire hotel portfolio of Service Properties Trust. The real estate investment trust owns about a third of Sonesta and has engaged the operator to run 68 of the properties it owns.
Those 68 hotels contain 17,013 rooms, equivalent to roughly 17% of Sonesta's system of about 100,000 rooms. Service Properties Trust carried the Sonesta-operated hotels at a book value of $3.98 billion in its second-quarter filings, well above the level of the TKO proposal.
The offer has introduced uncertainty around a block of properties that represents a meaningful share of Sonesta's managed footprint. Service Properties Trust has not indicated how it will respond to the approach.