Tristan Schukraft and the business of a good night out

Tristan Schukraft has a practical reason for wanting a restaurant to stay open late: he does not cook for himself. At The Canteen, beside Fire Island Pines Harbor, he has talked about the problem of leaving a club at three in the morning and finding nowhere to eat. A hospitality portfolio can look rather abstract from a distance. Bring it down to a hungry customer on a boardwalk and the job becomes easier to understand.

He notices the cables, too. In a 2025 conversation at The Canteen, he discussed tidying the wiring, replacing furniture and installing air conditioning. Saltwater, rot and an old septic system also occupied his attention. These are the less photogenic possessions that come with buying a place where people expect to have fun. Nobody goes dancing for the plumbing. Everybody has an opinion when it fails.

Schukraft made his start in airline travel technology. He founded ID90, later known as ID90 Travel, and became its CEO. Today his Tryst Hospitality interests include hotels, bars and restaurants across several destinations. The distance between those businesses looks smaller when you consider the recurring question behind them: what makes an experience unnecessarily difficult for the person paying for it?

A ticket to somewhere else

Raised in Los Angeles, Schukraft went abroad as a teenage model. Italy and Hong Kong were among the stops. Travel was familiar from childhood; his family worked in the airline business. Before he owned hotel rooms, he understood the pleasures of getting somewhere cheaply and the peculiar habits of people whose jobs made flying accessible.

His parents offered a $10,000 loan to help start a business, with a condition familiar to many wandering sons: come home. He supplemented the money by selling Razor scooters. The scooter venture produced another $16,000. There was something usefully unromantic about financing an online travel company by selling a fashionable object in person. Before negotiating with hotels, he had to persuade someone to buy a scooter.

ID90 began in 2000 with a specific audience: airline personnel. Its early opportunity lay in travel discounts and hotel inventory. A narrowly defined customer could be valuable to a hotel with an empty room. The difficulty was getting both sides to arrive: members wanted worthwhile offers, while hotels wanted evidence of members. A marketplace is a party whose guests all ask who else is coming.

By October 2001, the company could point to a substantial hotel partner. Kimpton had listed all 34 of its North American properties on ID90. An announcement that month described a service reaching employees of 57 international airlines. Hotels were confronting cancellations and empty rooms after September 11. Airline employees represented a distinct group of potential guests, with access to travel and reasons to keep moving.

The arrangement offered hotels a way to reach that group without turning every discounted room into a public advertisement for lower prices. It also gave the young company a concrete answer to the question of who was participating. The early business was already about matching a particular traveler with a particular kind of spare capacity.

The next move was into airline employee e-ticketing. Schukraft has described resistance from people accustomed to paper processes, and the financial strain of backing a system before an airline agreed to use it. Hawaiian Airlines eventually became the first customer for the concept. That first agreement gave him something a presentation could not: an airline willing to proceed.

A 2007 patent application names him as inventor of a reservation and ticketing process for space-available airline employee seats. It is a dry document with a revealing subject. The work concerned the machinery behind the trip, where an employee’s itinerary had to move through an electronic process. Years before the hotel opening parties, his attention was on getting the journey to function.

The customer gets the keys

He eventually stepped away from running ID90. In a 2024 interview, he said he retained a stake after plans to sell the company did not produce a sale. The distinction matters to his story: his next ventures followed a long operating career, with an ownership interest continuing after he left daily management.

There was an unsuccessful run for West Hollywood City Council in 2013. He had publicly announced his candidacy the previous December, offering his business experience as a qualification for city government. The move fits his stated impatience with inefficient systems, though voters did not give him the chance to apply that impatience from a council seat.

He also invested in Frontiers, the LGBTQ publication. The magazine later closed after it had been sold. For someone now concerned with the survival of established gathering places, that chapter carries weight. A business can contain a community’s record as well as its accounts. When it disappears, another company opening somewhere else does not automatically replace what was there.

His interest in hospitality also has a less solemn origin. Seeing The Birdcage helped inspire his wish to own a venue. He has joked about discovering that the establishment in the film was a nightclub rather than the hotel he remembered. His current collection accommodates either interpretation. It is a generous way to resolve a disputed movie memory.

In June 2023, he announced the acquisition of The Tryst, a beachfront hotel on Condado Beach in San Juan, along with Circo nightclub. The hotel had opened decades earlier as the Atlantic Beach Hotel. This was an existing address with a history, rooms and a restaurant, rather than a brand beginning entirely on a drawing board.

San Juan also reflects his own geography. Schukraft is based in Puerto Rico, and his hospitality plans there join somewhere to stay with somewhere to go out. A destination depends on the evening beyond the lobby. Guests can enjoy a room and still need a reason to leave it.

The Abbey brought that relationship between customer and owner into focus. Schukraft had been a patron before agreeing to buy the West Hollywood venue and its neighbor, The Chapel, from founder David Cooley. The agreement was announced in November 2023; the transaction completed in April 2024. Reported property sales totaled $27 million, with the operating business purchased separately for an undisclosed amount.

Cooley had built The Abbey from a coffee shop over more than three decades. The new owner therefore acquired a place with regulars who had their own ideas about it. That is an unusual advantage and a demanding inheritance. Customers already know why they care. A buyer has to learn which changes help the place continue and which merely announce that somebody new is in charge.

Room for the party

The Tryst Puerto Vallarta offered another setting for the approach. Its April 2025 grand opening included Jennifer Coolidge, a surprise appearance by Demi Lovato, and a rooftop performance. An opening party can briefly turn a hotel into a social event for people far beyond its guest list. The more durable test comes after the famous visitors have checked out.

The hotel’s social programming, including drag brunch, makes entertainment part of the stay. Small details carry the same intention: Schukraft has talked about stocking sugar-free Red Bull and designing for the crowd he hopes will gather. Such choices are specific enough to be noticed. They suggest a host who has opinions about how his guests spend an afternoon.

He has described a larger problem behind the purchases: an earlier generation of LGBTQ business owners is retiring. Someone must take responsibility for the venues they created. His answer has been to buy some of them and keep operating them. That makes the ambition tangible, with the expense and risk attached to tangible things.

“You can’t be everything to everyone.”

Tristan Schukraft

A familiar place, an unfinished building

Fire Island puts that responsibility under particularly close observation. In 2024, Schukraft acquired a 75 percent stake in the Pines Resort commercial district, including The Blue Whale, the Pavilion nightclub, The Canteen and the former hotel intended to become The Tryst Fire Island. These places share a waterfront and a public accustomed to returning to it.

By September 2026, the hotel remained unfinished. Schukraft attributed the delay to permits and said he was confident about the following season. That makes 2027 an expressed target, dependent on approvals. Doors and windows, he said, had been waiting in a warehouse. Enthusiasm has a different schedule from a permitting process.

The waiting matters because this is also somebody’s summer destination. People encounter the building while going about their holidays. Their expectations are part of the operating environment, alongside the physical constraints of a waterfront site. Buying a familiar place brings the buyer into a conversation already underway.

The neighborhood is part of the room

Chicago offers another version of the question. In April 2026, plans for a 21-room Tryst hotel on North Halsted Street included rooftop pools and a location inside Northalsted’s established LGBTQ neighborhood. No opening date had been announced. A separate team was planning another hotel nearby, putting two proposals into a district whose bars and shops already attract visitors.

Schukraft welcomed the other investment. His argument was that travelers would want to sleep in the neighborhood where they planned to eat, drink and shop. The room becomes part of a longer evening, and the hotel’s surroundings become part of what it sells.

For a founder who began with airline personnel, the route is understandable. First came the problem of reaching a destination. Then came a growing interest in what happens after arrival. At the other end of all those bookings is somebody looking for company, a familiar atmosphere, perhaps something to eat after dancing. Schukraft now owns several places where that person might turn up. Keeping them worth the trip is the daily assignment.