Geoff Graf is the Vice President of Business Development at Hogan Hospitality Group, a hotel management company that operates and develops hospitality assets for property owners. He leads efforts to identify opportunities and build strategic partnerships to support portfolio growth. With decades of experience, he has held leadership roles across operations, asset management, and business development. His career includes working with major hotel groups and driving expansion through acquisitions, development, and long-term owner relationships.
In this episode…
Geoff Graf is VP of Business Development at Hogan Hospitality Group, a family-owned hotel management company with roughly 3,400 rooms across Hawaii and the US mainland. His 43-year career spans Colony Hotels, Aston, Outrigger, and Aqua — where he doubled the portfolio from 14 to 29 hotels and helped engineer the Aqua-Aston merger, which created the largest hotel management company in Hawaii at the time. Kin Sio sits down with Geoff on The Lights On Podcast to dig into what separates companies that grow to be acquired from those built to stay.
Geoff's path wasn't linear. He started as a houseman in 1983 at a 60-room boutique at the foot of Diamond Head — recruited off the rugby pitch by his coach, who happened to manage the property. At 30, he left the industry for three years to compete internationally in outrigger canoe and surf ski racing, placing in the world rankings. When he came back, Colony Hotels sent him to Molokai to manage Kaluakoi Resort and Golf Club: a former Sheraton with a golf course, struggling occupancy, ownership under financial strain, limited air lift to the island, and buildings with TVs and phones stripped out. His answer was the "Pakeli" package — pakeli means "escape" in Hawaiian — which marketed those bare rooms as a deliberate unplugged experience, borrowing from Kona Village's model. It filled rooms, drove restaurant revenue, and worked. He notes it predated the unplugged travel trend by about 30 years.
The conversation sharpens when Geoff draws the line between Aqua's growth strategy — explicitly designed for acquisition, which is exactly what happened when Aston's parent company absorbed them — and Hogan's: long-term owner relationships, no management agreements structured around an exit date, a deliberate consolidation from five states down to California and Arizona when remote properties were pulling more resources than they returned. For small independent operators who aren't ready for a full management agreement, Geoff's advice is direct: outsource revenue management and digital marketing first, get hospitality-specific accounting in place now if you ever plan to sell, and stop relying exclusively on OTAs — most small operators take that route, Geoff says, and it cuts directly into their margins. The right management partner, he says, pays for itself 99.5% of the time — and means you stop getting the 1 AM call.
