Stephen Zsigray and the art of buying time

A hotel owner who wants to buy more hotels may first have to become very good at selling them. Stephen Zsigray has been living with that awkward sequence at Ashford Hospitality Trust. In early 2025, six months into the chief executive’s job, he spoke about getting back to acquiring portfolios. By August 2026, he was still explaining how property sales could strengthen the balance sheet. Growth had a queue in front of it.

The tension gives his career a useful shape. Zsigray arrived at Ashford in 2014 through investment management, having worked in consulting and derivatives. He later ran a business that helped guests open hotel doors with their phones. Now, as president and CEO of the Dallas-based hotel real estate investment trust, he deals with the financial arrangements behind those doors: debt, cash, operating costs and the price at which a property becomes worth selling.

A handsome lobby can make hospitality look effortless. His assignments have repeatedly concerned the machinery required to keep it running. There is little romance in a maturity extension. There can be considerable relief.

A trading desk before a hotel desk

Zsigray began his career at Deloitte Consulting in St. Louis, advising Fortune 500 businesses on mergers and acquisitions, business transformation and process improvement. Those are broad headings, but they describe a practical starting point: looking at an organization, working out where its arrangements create friction, and considering how they might work better.

At UBS Investment Bank in New York, his responsibilities moved into markets. He traded and helped clients structure derivatives across equities, fixed income and commodities. The work put different kinds of exposure on the same desk. A business could have a view about the future and still need protection against being wrong about its timing.

His education included a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Saint Louis University and an MBA in finance from Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business. On his public LinkedIn profile, the finance credentials share space with an unusually precise score: 770 on the GMAT. It is a small detail, and an appropriately numerical one.

The move to Ashford in 2014 brought him into its investment management division as a trader and portfolio manager. He had entered the hospitality orbit through capital markets. That background becomes relevant later, when his responsibilities include the company’s cash management platform and corporate hedging strategy. The connection is visible in the work itself; it requires no childhood prophecy about wanting to own a hotel.

A key on a phone

Then came an assignment closer to the guest. Zsigray served as president and chief operating officer of OpenKey, an Ashford-affiliated hospitality technology company providing digital guest keys and access-control solutions. The guest-facing proposition was easy to grasp: a phone could become part of getting into a room. Delivering that convenience required a business connecting software with the physical world of hotel locks.

The contrast with a trading desk is instructive. A financial instrument can be evaluated through its structure and exposures. A guest standing outside a room has a shorter list of concerns. Does the door open? Hotel technology has to survive that wonderfully impatient test.

His OpenKey chapter also has a technical footnote. An application for an electronic-lock upgrade system names Stephen Vincent Zsigray III alongside Eric Daley, Christopher Shane Hickingbottom and Todd J. Person. The related patent was granted in December 2023. It is a concrete connection to product development within a career otherwise described largely in financing terms.

By 2021, he was speaking about OpenKey from his strategy role at Ashford, commenting on the appointment of Ron Owens as CEO. His work had crossed between investing, operating a technology company and supporting its leadership transition. The later hotel CEO appointment followed a career already containing several different versions of the hospitality business.

The calendar becomes part of the job

In May 2020, Zsigray became senior vice president of corporate finance and strategy. His responsibilities included cash management and hedging. He also became chief financial officer and treasurer of Stirling Hotels & Resorts in November 2023. These roles put him inside several connected Ashford businesses, with responsibilities extending beyond one hotel portfolio.

The scale of his finance work is substantial, and the wording matters. Across the Ashford platforms, he helped raise more than $1.3 billion in common and preferred equity, secure over $1.1 billion in new corporate and property debt, and negotiate maturity extensions on over $3.3 billion in mortgage debt. These are contributions across the platforms, rather than personal proceeds or a single transaction.

A maturity extension changes when a bill must be settled. It can give an owner time to refinance, sell an asset or improve its performance. The obligation remains. For an executive whose work includes liquidity and hedging, the calendar is part of the operating environment, every bit as real as the buildings.

Ashford announced his succession in April 2024. Rob Hays would leave at the end of June after nearly two decades with the company, with the intervening months devoted to a handoff. Zsigray took over after ten years inside the Ashford businesses. Chairman Monty Bennett and Hays both endorsed the appointment. The assignment went to someone already familiar with the financial work waiting on the desk.

Growth, down to the parking lot

The plan Zsigray introduced in December 2024 had a name built for an investor presentation: GRO AHT. Its target was $50 million in incremental improvement to run-rate corporate EBITDA, an increase the company put at more than 20%. EBITDA measures earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization. The target described an intended improvement, rather than money already earned.

Its three priorities were overhead reduction, revenue growth and operating efficiency. Under those headings sat specific changes: negotiating advisory costs, reducing professional-services expenses, adjusting staffing and labor use, reviewing contracts and installing energy-saving lighting. The plan also called for reductions in management and board compensation. The burden of improvement reached into both corporate and property operations.

By February 2025, the examples were refreshingly tangible. Property managers had implemented menu analysis, changes to parking agreements, refreshed gift-shop and corner-store offerings, and historic-preservation fees in applicable markets. Together, those four initiatives were expected to produce more than $3 million in additional annual hotel EBITDA. Even a strategy with a capitalized name eventually reaches the snack shelf.

There are tradeoffs within that list. A parking adjustment affects a guest’s bill; a staffing change affects employees; a contract negotiation affects a supplier. Calling all of it efficiency would flatten the decisions. Zsigray’s program brought those choices together under a financial target, leaving execution to a network that included the advisor and property managers.

His own public enthusiasm was less formal. Sharing news of the initiative on LinkedIn, he wrote, “Looking forward to an exciting 2025! Let’s GRO!” The pun required no further financing. The program did require measurable follow-through.

The debt changes shape

February 12, 2025 brought a financing milestone. Ashford closed a $580 million mortgage refinancing secured by 16 hotels. The previous loans had a combined outstanding balance of approximately $438.7 million. About $72 million of excess proceeds went toward paying off the remaining corporate strategic financing, including its exit fee. Other proceeds funded transaction costs and reserves for future capital expenditure.

The distinction between corporate financing and property mortgages is essential to understanding the achievement. Ashford announced that its corporate strategic financing had been fully repaid. The company still had mortgages secured by hotels. This transaction reorganized its financial position and addressed obligations; it did not make a hotel owner with substantial borrowing suddenly debt-free.

Zsigray had also described a selective approach to dispositions. “We were extremely diligent about the assets that we sold,” he said in January 2025. Some properties went to market and stayed in the portfolio when proposed prices failed to satisfy the company. Selling was a decision about value as well as a way of raising cash.

“We were extremely diligent about the assets that we sold.”

Stephen Zsigray / January 2025

By the second quarter of 2026, the two sides of his assignment were visible together. Ashford reported comparable revenue per available room growth of 6.6% and comparable Hotel EBITDA growth of 9.6%. Those measures concern the performance of comparable properties, helping distinguish hotel operations from changes in the portfolio. They are different measures from the corporate EBITDA target in GRO AHT.

The same August update described eleven completed hotel sales, nine during the quarter and two afterward. Most proceeds went to mortgage debt. Zsigray continued to see strategic sales as a way of improving financial flexibility. The company also announced an August Highland refinancing that addressed its final 2026 maturity and released 14 hotels from a cash sweep. Operating progress and balance-sheet work were proceeding side by side.

A different kind of inventory

Away from the financing updates, there is another public scene. In May 2024, Erica Yaeger named Zsigray among North Texas Food Bank Advisory Council members who stocked shelves and served neighbors at the Network of Community Ministries Community Pantry. The accompanying photographs show the group outside the pantry and volunteers working among supplies. Here, inventory meant something pleasantly literal.

His advisory-council service sits alongside earlier board service with the Dallas Security Traders Association. The pantry visit gives that council role a practical setting: shelves to stock, supplies to organize and neighbors to serve. It adds a scene away from the investor presentations and their familiar vocabulary of transactions and titles.

His acquisition ambition remains the thread to watch. He has described wanting Ashford to participate in portfolio purchases again, while his later updates show how much attention sales, refinancing and existing hotels still demand. That makes the story unfinished in a useful way. Zsigray has experience with keys that open a guest’s door. The next opening he wants depends on a longer set of calculations, and on what the hotels already in his care can earn.