Curtis CrimminsCurtisCrimmins

He was a bright child, the kind who joins the Latin Club, and his first job was as an embalmer's apprentice at a local funeral home. Tending to the dead, who cannot repay any kindness, taught him what hospitality is. His first job in the industry was as a concierge at The Cloister at Sea Island, a short drive from where he started.

The years around those two jobs were not orderly. Trauma, addiction, and episodes of mental illness put him in front of the criminal justice system and, for a time, in jail. He got treatment, and then he did the slower work that comes after it. By his early twenties he had changed the course of his life, and he has held it since. He says so plainly, because second chances are the reason he has a biography, and because many of the people who clean rooms and carry bags have a story like it and are rarely asked to tell it.

He chose hospitality deliberately, and for a reason older than the industry. He studied at Full Sail University, Columbia University, and Emory University, and what stayed with him was Greek and Latin, above all the idea the Greeks called xenia: the bond between host and guest, so binding that Zeus himself was said to enforce it. By that measure a hotel is a place where a stranger is received with dignity, whoever they are and however they arrived, and the real estate is incidental. The idea has outlasted everything the industry has done to it. It is also where he healed, and where he became the man he meant to be.

He spent the next two decades working through every level of the business: housekeeper, front desk agent, and concierge before general manager, general manager before area vice president, across Marriott, Ritz-Carlton, Hilton, IHG, and Best Western. He is a Certified Hotel Administrator and a certified general manager for four of the largest hotel companies in the world, and he served as Chief of Staff at OYO during its United States expansion. As a developer he built a Hampton Inn, a Fairfield Inn, and a Best Western Premier from the ground up, and he has renovated dozens of hotels, independent and branded, worth more than one hundred million dollars in all.

In 2020, certain that the pandemic would disrupt travel more than anything before it, he founded Roomza. It began as a hotel brand and became the truth about the individual room, scored from real stays, which no hotel can edit or buy. It is xenia turned into data. The guest deserves to know what is behind the door before it opens.

He advises founders in artificial intelligence, robotics, and hospitality, and the venture funds that back them. He bought bitcoin very early, before it was a subject of polite conversation, and has never been a believer, then or now.

He was born Curtis Allen O'Neal. In 2011 he met Michael, a combat veteran of the United States Army, and became a military spouse, the proud kind, through a deployment and through the injuries that brought Michael home and ended his service. They married in 2013, and Curtis took his husband's name.

He lives in Seattle with Michael, and with Katie, Shako, and Priscilla. He travels whenever he can and talks late whenever he is allowed. He reads about the Second World War and the old empires of Europe, keeps close to his nieces and nephews, and likes red candy of every kind.