Hudson Valley Resort is sold to HNA Group

The Hudson Valley Resort in Kerhonkson has been sold for $13.8 million to HNA Group, a Chinese conglomerate that operates more than a dozen airlines and owns more than 440 hotels worldwide. Jian Wang. the chairman of HNA Group, and four other top company officials toured the hotel and grounds on Saturday barely a week after the purchase was finalized, according to Orest Fedash, the general manager of HVR.

The deal closed on Friday, Nov. 6, and the following Monday HNA representatives from New York City were on site to speak with employees face to face.

“When they said they were coming to speak to employees I thought it would be like a town meeting: ‘Hi, this is what we’re going to do, goodbye.’ It was none of that. They were here for three hours,” said Fedash in a phone interview. Over a hundred employees showed up to meet with the representatives. “I don’t think I’ve even had a hundred people at the company Christmas party,” Fedash said.

Then came news that the chairman himself would be flying in from China. Again Fedash said he was surprised. “In all the years I’ve worked here I have never met the owner. Yet in such a short time I’ve met the chairman of this multibillion dollar company,” he said. Wang was accompanied by Xiangdong Tan, president of HNA group, Guoqing Chen, CEO of Pacific American Corp., Ying Lu, chairman of HNA holdings Group, and Daniel Chen, president of HNA Group North America. Fedash said the entire team was “warm and cordial to everyone.” Their tour of the hotel and grounds lasted approximately two hours.

The fate of the Hudson Valley Resort has been in question for years. Rochester residents are full of stories about the Granit, the name locals seem to prefer despite the renaming nearly a decade ago. They speak of it almost as you would an eccentric but endearing relative and usually end their anecdote by mentioning the enormous potential of the 550-acre property. That potential was recognized by now former owner Eliot Spitzer (not the former governor but apparently a relation). However, he bit off more than he could chew with the 323-plus rooms and filed for bankruptcy protection in 2010. Before the recent sale, he had tried to secure the interest of a new owner by seeking state legislature approval for video lottery terminals. The bill was reportedly blocked by state Sen. John Bonacic, chairman of the gaming committee, who thought the plans would compete with the Sullivan county casino. That defeat was the epilogue in Spitzer’s saga, or so it seemed.

A month or so later, Town of Rochester Supervisor Carl Chipman said he was contacted by an attorney for an interested buyer who requested anonymity at that time. “He told me they had plans to continue it as a hotel but also wondered if it would be a problem to use it as a retreat center for their own people. I told them I didn’t think so since that basically fell into the definition of a resort,” Chipman said. “But the second thing was they wanted to put a heliport in there. That would pose a bit more of a problem with FAA regulations,” he said. Chipman suggested the Ellenville airport as an alternative, and he said they seemed amenable to that. Then he said he heard nothing more until the sale had been made public. Reportedly the purchase was partly facilitated by Joseph Wolfer, the retired former chairman of Kennedy Funding Inc., the largest mortgage holder for HVR.

HNA Group was founded in 1993 and covers a wide range of industries including aviation, tourism, logistics and financial services. Airlines account for about 45 percent of their business. With assets currently around $78 billion and annual revenue at $25 billion, the Fortune 500 company seems more than capable of refurbishing a weathered resort.

Fedash says it is looking like a busy few months ahead. He is now the process of rehiring the current employees with HNA’s own paperwork. As far as renovation plans, it seems clear they are moving forward. “People are excited,” he said. “But the most exciting thing is that they are not looking for investors. They are the investors.”