In November 2024, Henderson Park and Hines sold the Grand Hyatt Athens to Blackstone for €235m.
Henderson Park and Hines purchased the closed hotel during a bankruptcy auction in 2017. At the time, Greece was of limited interest to hotel investors, but there were already signs of recovery in the Greek hotel market, said John Brennan, chairman of Henderson Park’s operating and asset management platform Klarent Hospitality.
By luck the building next door - a bankrupt cinema - also came onto the market. Henderson Park and Hines bought it as well and combined the two buildings to create a 558-bedroom hotel with 1,600 square meters of conference space.
Local partners
Local development expertise was critical in the success of the project, explained Brennan. “We had development expertise inside Hines that is global in nature, and we were able to call upon specialist knowledge, not just out of the local Athens office, which had been set up at the same time as the acquisition.”
Paul Gomopoulos, head of Hines Greece, grew up in Greece and the US. He could call on specialist construction and development people from Hines Europe for help.
It was a complex project, particularly the acquisition of the cinema and the bringing together of the two buildings into one integrated and operationally functional building.
Kokari were brought in as local managers too. Yannis Daskalantonakis, the CEO of Kokari, and Brennan had previously worked together on several projects.
“Kokari brought with them a very deep understanding of how things function in Greece, at a governmental and local level,” said Brennan.
Dual market appeal
The new hotel was positioned as a pan-European MICE venue combined with strong transient leisure appeal during the summer months.
“You see this combination in resort destinations in the US, places like Orlando and Sarasota, but it doesn't happen very often in Europe. What we did was allow the property to have a full year of high demand,” commented Brennan.
Ana Ivanovic, executive vice president, JLL, who worked on the transaction, said: “As a broker, obviously, once you launch a process, the performance of the asset during that process is extremely important. In this case, you made our job almost easy.”
She asked: “What was the recipe for success, for making the asset one of the highest NOI per key benchmarks for Athens?”
Brennan joked: “If you ask my boss he’ll say it’s because I lowballed the forecasts, but that’s not correct.”
Strong performance
The business mix of the hotel and its structuring pointed towards high margin, high profitability business, he said: “This idea of the MICE business, giving you the first and fourth quarters, and then the transient business coming in in the middle of the year obviously delivered.”
The hotel had year-round occupancy of 85 percent in 2024 and drives high TrevPAR but not necessarily the highest room rates, he said. The Grand Hyatt branding appeals to the right customers, but critically, does not impose onerous operating standards that eat into profitability, said Brennan, and 26 percent of revenue comes from food and beverage, but predominantly catering and banqueting.
The rooftop swimming pools with views of the Acropolis are a unique selling point, noted Ivanovic, allowing for high yielding leisure demand.
“If we hadn’t bought the cinema next door, we wouldn’t have those views,” noted Brennan.
Limited data
Because the hotel had limited performance data, it helped to be selling to Blackstone who bought into Klarent’s gameplan and projections for the hotel.
“There was no detailed track record to speak of other than six months of trading in 2024 but we were able to bridge out the details as to how we would build up the business by segment, by rate category, and because it was Blackstone on the other side of the table, they got it,” Brennan commented.
One key piece of advice from Brennan is to front-load the paperwork: “It just always seems to take longer than you think, particularly the technical aspects,” and to address due diligence red flags promptly.
This turned out to be another advantage of selling to Blackstone: “When they said there was an issue with the due diligence, there was an issue. They didn't purposefully make things up. They were very professional, and when there was an issue, we knew we needed to deal with it comprehensively and appropriately.”
All quotes taken from the IHIF EMEA 2025 panel: ‘Sealing the deal: key advice from recent transactions.’ The session was moderated by Ana Ivanovic, executive vice president, JLL.