Shake-up at Palm Beach’s Tideline
Local developer Jeff Greene cuts ties with the management company that ran the resort.
Palm Beach billionaire Jeff Greene has parted ways with Kimpton Hotels and Restaurants, the management company he selected in 2014 to run his 134-room oceanf ro nt Ti del i ne Resort and Spa.
Kimpton, which specializes in boutique hotels, notified t r a v e l e r s b y email this month that it would no longer operate the Tideline. As of Monday, all mention of the Kimpton brand had been removed from the resort’s website.
Greene said the split was “an amicable parting of the ways.”
“The hotel has done great, even as a Kimpton,” Greene said Tuesday. “I just felt that our vision wasn’t totally aligned.”
Kimpton said it stopped operating the hotel on Jan. 19, adding that Sand & Sea LLC, an entity affiliated with Greene, would take over management of the Tideline and its restaurants.
Greene owns three other hotels, two in Palm Beach County and one in California, but he said the Tideline is of particular interest to him because it is located in Palm Beach, where he also lives.
“We live in this community,” Greene said. “To me, it is a reflection of us. The number one goal is to have the best of everything.”
Chr i s t i ne Fa hmy ha s b e e n tapped to be the Tideline’s new general manager, Greene said. Fahmy previously worked at The Breakers in Palm Beach.
Despite the management shift, Greene said the majority of the resort’s other employees will continue to work at the property.
“A lot of our key people have been at the hotel since we acquired it, “Greene said. “We are going to keep a lot of the great people we already had.”
For travelers who booked rooms while the property was run by Kimpton, reservations will carry over to the new management team.
“The hotel keeps running,” Greene said, adding that his top priorities are quality and service.
Kimpton said the new management team would honor existing reservations at the rate in which they were booked.
Greene said he plans to invest about $1 million in renovations at the resort, including removing wallpaper and replacing some darker finishing with lighter colors. The changes are designed to make the resort feel more like a “Malibu beach house,” he said.
Televisions in guest rooms will also be swapped out for larger 55- i nch s et s . And guests wil l soon be able to order movies in their rooms using their Amazon accounts, Greene said.
Greene bought the Tideline, formally known as the Omphoy Ocean Resort, in 2011. His search for a company to manage the hotel took years. He ultimately settled on Kimpton in mid-2014, after staying at hotels the company ran in New York, Boston and Miami with his wife, Mei Sze.
San Francisco-based Kimpton operates more than 60 hotels in nearly three dozen destinations in the United States and the Cayman Islands.
Last year, the Tideline was one of six Palm Beach County hotels to rank among the best resorts on the state’s Atlantic Coast in Conde Nast Traveler’s annual readers’ choice awards. The Tideline earned the No. 4 spot on last year’s list, while the Eau Palm Beach Resort & Spa in Manalapan took the top honors.