Ringo Hospitality Inc is a hotel management company founded by Claire Collery in 2024 to run the Apple Tree Inn in Lenox, Massachusetts.

For three summers in college, Claire worked at the concierge desk of the Chatham Bars Inn in Cape Cod and fell in love with the industry. She loved the hours sitting at her desk in its glamorous old lobby, helping guests experience the best of the area, and reading and writing notes about them in the property management system.

But after a discouraging conversation with the hotel General Manager, who advised her to stay far away from hotels if she ever wanted to relax on a night, weekend, or holiday, she didn’t know how to make a career out of it. She got her first post-college job working in real estate development at a company that owned shopping malls and then did a stint in tech. It wasn’t until business school at Berkeley Haas when she had the revelation that not everyone in the hotel world was a harried GM at the end of a punishing summer season, and that there are people who develop hotels just like she had worked developing malls. So she set out to become one of those people. 

She interned in development finance at Rosewood Hotels & Resorts and then worked at Starwood Capital Group, where she was an asset manager for a couple hotels in their giant portfolio. Where CBI had given her a love of being on the ground with the guests, Starwood taught her about sources & uses, equity multiples, and Index Match. After three years, she decided she understood enough to strike out on her own. Moreover, she knew it was the only way to find out what she didn’t yet understand. 

She bought the Apple Tree Inn in April — a 34-key hotel in three buildings on a hill directly across the street from Tanglewood. The main building, a rambling wood frame construction that houses the lobby, restaurant, bar, and 13 guests rooms, was built in 1885 by a descendant of the Astor family, who used it as a summer house. It was converted into a hotel in the 1950s and a second building with 21 more guest rooms was added in the 1960s. The last building is a carriage house from 1890 that’s been converted into an owner’s apartment, and that’s where we will live. We also have 21 acres of grass and woods and big dreams for them  (wildflowers, chickens, stone walls). 

This first summer will be a hard learning experience. Guests have already booked; immediately upon taking ownership, they become her responsibility, and she’ll try to run it all as-is for the season. She is inheriting a maintenance and housekeeping staff, a website and reservation system, and an Instagram account. She’ll be the only full-time person there. She’ll be negotiating insurance, taking bookings, checking you in, making coffee, and cleaning toilets. There is no chef for the restaurant yet, so she’ll have to bake some coffee cake. It helps that her family and friends have such a useful range of talents, from interior design to user research.

I’m her husband, Toph. I remember one all-nighter in college at Bowdoin with Claire when a classmate asked what she’d do after graduation and she said her craziest idea was to run a hotel. At the time I had never stayed in a hotel I cared about and found it a baffling answer from a girl I was already in love with. But then, in our years apart, I liked to imagine I could stay there one day. I came to appreciate how she saw the full stack of services a hotel represents, and how thoughtfully you need to model other minds to achieve hospitality. I’m now lucky to get to live there with her and will write occasionally about what I learn.