Trump Hotels will move forward with a massive expansion of its U.S. business, company CEO Eric Danziger pledged at an industry conference Tuesday.
“There are 26 major metropolitan areas in the U.S., and we’re in five,” Danziger told attendees following a panel discussion at the Americas Lodging Investment Summit in Los Angeles, according to Bloomberg News. “I don’t see any reason that we couldn’t be in all of them eventually.”
Bloomberg reported that the company currently manages eight Trump-branded hotels in the U.S., meaning that an expansion to 26 cities would more than triple the total. Danziger specifically mentioned Dallas, Seattle, Denver and San Francisco as potential sites for new luxury hotels, and said that the company’s lower-priced offshoot, Scion, will begin opening in smaller U.S. cities this year, according to Bloomberg.
At a news conference earlier this month, Trump and his lawyers announced that he would not sell his business or place his assets in a blind trust as president. Instead, he turned daily management of the company over to his two adult sons and announced he would not enter into new foreign deals as president.
Trump’s lawyer Sheri Dillon said at the presser that “no new foreign deals” whatsoever would be made during his presidency, and that new domestic deals will face “severe restrictions” and “go through a vigorous vetting process.” An ethics adviser will be tasked with reviewing new deals for conflicts of interest and ethics issues.
Danziger joked about the new restrictions the President has agreed to, which ethics experts say are not nearly sufficient, at Tuesday’s conference.
“Both brands and any others we create will have a domestic emphasis for the next four or eight years,” he said, prompting laughter from the crowd, according to Bloomberg.
