Curtis Crimmins

It was not an easy childhood. His family was poor, and addiction, illiteracy, and crime were ordinary features of the world around him. He was also an intensely curious child, drawn to history, language, and the rituals by which people care for one another.

His first job was as an embalmer's apprentice at a funeral home. He has often said that tending to people who could never repay the kindness taught him something essential about service. His first hotel job came later, as a concierge at The Cloister at Sea Island, a short drive up the coast from the motels his mother had cleaned.

The path between those jobs and the life that followed was not straight. As a young man, Curtis struggled with trauma, addiction, and mental illness. At 22, following a serious mental health crisis, he spent more than a year in mandatory, court-ordered treatment. Facing incarceration and the criminal justice system, he credits that intervention with saving his life. He rebuilt and began again. He tells this part of the story because second chances changed his life, and because the people who clean hotel rooms, park cars, carry bags, and stand behind front desks often arrive at work carrying histories their guests will never know.

Hospitality became both a profession and a place to rebuild. Curtis worked his way through the hotel business from housekeeping, front desk, and concierge roles into hotel management and eventually executive leadership. His career has included Marriott, Ritz-Carlton, Hilton, IHG, Best Western, and OYO, where he served as Chief of Staff during the company's expansion in the United States.

He became a Certified Hotel Administrator and earned general manager certifications from several of the world's largest hotel companies. As an operator and developer, he has built hotels from the ground up, including Hampton Inn, Fairfield Inn, and Best Western Premier properties, and has worked on the acquisition, development, renovation, or operation of hotels representing more than one hundred million dollars in real estate.

He has remained a serious student of history, language, and the classical world. That interest gave him a vocabulary for something he had already learned in Georgia.

The ancient Greeks called it xenia.

Xenia described the sacred relationship between host and guest, an obligation considered so important that Zeus himself was its protector. A stranger arriving at your door was to be received with dignity before you knew who he was, what he possessed, or whether he could ever return the favor. Curtis came to believe that much of modern hospitality could be understood through that old idea. A hotel is real estate, certainly, but its purpose begins when a stranger walks through the door.

In 2020, he founded Roomza, first as a hotel company and later as a technology company focused on something the hotel industry had largely ignored: the individual room. Roomza builds room-level intelligence from real stays so travelers can understand what is actually behind the door before they open it.

His work has increasingly extended beyond hotels. He advises founders, investors, and companies working across hospitality, artificial intelligence, robotics, and real estate, and he speaks publicly about entrepreneurship, hospitality, second chances, and the obligations that come with building things that affect other people's lives.

Curtis has experienced homelessness himself, and housing and hunger remain personal causes. He mentors young people, particularly those whose beginnings do not neatly predict where they might end up. A video of him giving a ten-year-old boy a Montblanc pen, after the boy admired his own, was watched by millions of people. He also founded Cake It Forward, a nationwide project that provides free birthday cakes to people who might otherwise go without one, connecting recipients with donors, bakers, and volunteer drivers. Its premise is that everyone deserves to be celebrated at least once a year.

Ask him and he will tell you he is a hotelier. That identity reaches further back than any company he has founded. Hotels gave him his first serious profession, his education in people, and eventually a way to build a life far removed from the one that once seemed inevitable.

A proud Irish-American, Curtis was born Curtis Allen O'Neal. In 2011, he met Michael Crimmins, a combat veteran of the United States Army. Curtis became a military spouse, seeing Michael through his deployment and the injuries that eventually ended his military service. They married in 2013, and Curtis took his husband's name.

Curtis and Michael live in Seattle with Katie, a husky, Shako, a Maltese, and Priscilla, a black cat. Curtis spends much of his free time reading history, particularly the Second World War and the old empires of Europe. He travels constantly, keeps close to his nieces and nephews, talks late and often when anyone permits it, and has an unreasonable affection for red candy.

His newest company is The Visible Benefit Company, PBC, which launched in 2026. When an AI data center is built in a town, it makes sure the people who live there get a share they can see.

For all the companies, hotels, and ideas that have followed, the philosophy underneath them has changed very little from what he learned as a boy on the Georgia coast. When someone arrives at your door, receive them well.