#74 Barry Podob | Why the Biggest Tours Trust This Hotel
When Ozzy Osbourne was kicked out of Black Sabbath, he moved into a West Hollywood hotel called Le Parc. Sharon was his manager at the time. They fell in love, got married, and, as Barry Podob puts it, she saved him. That’s the story of how Le Parc became an entertainment hotel. Decades later, people still call to book a room and ask for Ozzy’s old one.
Barry has a confession: “I’m letting a big secret out now. I have no idea which room it was. So I always say, sure, you could have the room. We’re going to make sure we take care of you.”
That answer sums up how Barry has worked for nearly 25 years as the person who books music and entertainment groups at Le Parc Suite Hotel and its sister hotels in West Hollywood. In this episode of The Giggs Podcast, he sits down with Nikki Sanz to talk about how he built that business from nothing, what touring artists and crews actually need from a hotel, and why his whole philosophy comes down to one line: protect the guest, not the hotel.
He Never Planned on Hotels
Barry started his career in New York at a major advertising agency, handling the HR side of acquisitions: benefits, key players, contracts. When the agency bought a company in Los Angeles, they asked him to move out. He told them he couldn’t stand LA. They negotiated. After six months of flying back and forth every other week, he relocated and found out he was supposed to be there all along.
Then 9/11 hit, and that job was gone.
A friend asked if he’d be interested in hotel sales at a small 49-room property her husband owned. Barry told her he’d stayed in every hotel in America but didn’t know anything about selling one. He applied anyway, got the job, and took the hotel from 35% occupancy to 85% in a year.
“What I discovered was not only was I good at it, I really liked it. I liked the immediacy of talking to someone on the telephone, and the next day they were in the hotel lobby.”
A year later, he found Le Parc. He didn’t even know it had a reputation for entertainment until he got there.
A Music Fan Long Before He Was a Hotelier
Finding out what Le Parc was known for thrilled him, because music had been part of Barry’s life since August 1969, when he was at Woodstock. He spent Friday nights at the Fillmore East. Today he calls himself a country music freak. On the day of this recording, he was headed to see Luke Bryan at Bridgestone Arena.
That’s why he doesn’t treat touring groups as sales targets. He’s a lifelong fan who now gets to take care of the people who make the music.
The List That Built the Business
Ozzy gave Le Parc its reputation, but Barry built the business. It started with research. He’d look at who was coming to the Hollywood Bowl, the Staples Center, and the Greek Theatre, find out who was booking each group, and reach out directly.
“I would reach out to the person that was booking them and say, listen, I see you’re coming in on such and such a date. If you need rooms, I got them. And by the way, we give special rates to the entertainment industry.”
Over the years, that outreach turned into a list he calls “Who’s Booking Who.” It now holds 400 bands, each with the tour manager, the travel agency, the agent who books them, and a phone number.
He also threw a rooftop party at Le Parc during Tour Connection’s LA event, a gathering of hoteliers and travel agents who book touring groups. When the RSVPs came back, Barry couldn’t believe it. Around 200 people showed up, and guests told him it was better than the main event.
Why He Doesn’t Do the Hard Sell
Barry doesn’t believe in pushing. When award season comes around, he goes through his list, sees who’s been nominated, and emails the travel agent behind that act. He congratulates them, jokes that the nomination is surely due to their great travel arrangements, and tells them he voted for their group.
That’s it. No pitch.
“The most important thing, and you find this in any business, you got to stay in front of your audience. And that’s a very subtle way of doing it.”
He brings the same approach to travel agents. Early on, agents worried that if hotel reps got to know tour managers, they’d get cut out of the booking. So when a tour manager calls Barry directly, even to book a family vacation, he makes sure the travel agent gets the credit. Without travel agents, he says, he doesn’t have the groups.
Protect the Guest, Not the Hotel
Nikki asked Barry what makes Le Parc different from staying at a Marriott or a Hilton. His answer was simple.
“I have a philosophy that we have a can-do attitude. The brand names, they seem to be busy protecting the hotel. I don’t protect the hotel. I protect the guests. And the reason is the guests are the ones that are paying my salary.”
He pairs that with a second rule: it’s never about this reservation, it’s always about the next one. If a problem comes up with a group, his team deals with it immediately. And unlike a lot of hotel salespeople, Barry doesn’t hand a group off once it’s booked. He keeps ownership of every group from the minute they walk in the front door to the minute they get back on the bus.
The Group Resume
One of the ways Barry keeps that ownership is something he calls the group resume. Before a group arrives, he sends the whole hotel a rundown of who’s coming: their records, Grammys, and sales, but also where they’re coming from and where they’re going next.
That second part is the one crews will recognize. If a band plays Phoenix and the show ends at 11 p.m., they’ve got two hours of load-out, then an overnight drive. They’re going to show up at eight or nine in the morning.
“Well, we better be prepared for that.”
Knowing where they’re headed next tells housekeeping when rooms will open up and need to be turned around. Barry also Googles every name on the rooming list. He wants to know whether he has the band, the guitar tech, or the drum tech. Then his team mostly stays out of the way. Ninety-nine times out of 100, he says, people want to check in and be left alone.
Why Bus Drivers Get the Best Room
Some of the things Barry is proudest of are the ones nobody asks for. He doesn’t give liquor as an amenity, because crews are on the road around 200 days a year and he doesn’t want to make it any easier. And he goes out of his way for bus drivers.
“A lot of people, when they book a group, it’s like, oh, these are the bus drivers, put them anywhere. And I go, no, no, no. They’re getting the best room in the house.”
Drivers also get a breakfast voucher for their first day. It’s his way of saying thanks for getting the group there safely.
Barry is just as clear on who he enjoys working with most. Asked to pick between headliners, tour managers, and crew, he didn’t hesitate. He loves having the crews, and he has a special relationship with tour managers.
When Fans Find Out
Le Parc and its sister hotels sit in quiet residential neighborhoods, so most of the time nobody knows who’s coming and going. Barry has had plenty of big names in the building without a crowd forming.
Then one morning he came into work and found well over 100 young teenage girls, and their mothers, outside the hotel. The front desk told him 5 Seconds of Summer had tweeted where they were staying. When the band checked out that Friday, Barry told them they’d never have a time like that again, and that if they came back and he saw even two girls waiting outside, they were out.
In January, the band didn’t come back. Instead, Barry got a call from a rep at another hotel asking what he’d done to him, because there were now a hundred girls outside his door.
Seven Buses, 70 People, 15 Minutes
Barry has hosted groups of 50 to 60 people rehearsing for a month at a time. More recently, he had two groups of 70 people each, traveling on seven buses. He got their rooming lists organized by bus. When each bus pulled up, the people stepping off were handed keys that were already prepared for them.
“I want to say within 15 minutes we had 70 people in their rooms. And that makes me feel really, really good.”
When it doesn’t go that smoothly, because the hotel sold out the night before or guests checked out late, the group goes up to the pool and the hotel orders pizza while the rooms get turned. He credits his two-person team for keeping it all running: one handles credit cards and billing after he books a group, and the other enters the rooming list and double-checks confirmation numbers with the group.
The Top Dog Who Treats It Like a Hobby
Barry has won the Top Dog Award, voted on by people in the industry, ten times in a row. Still, he’s always seen the job as more of a hobby.
Early on, losing a booking used to devastate him. Over time he learned that quotes fall through for all kinds of reasons: a promoter is covering rooms, routing changes, or a rehearsal space gets booked out from under a group. Now his attitude is simpler: “You’re not coming? You don’t know what you’re missing.”
What still gets him is the other side of it. “When I come in in the morning and I turn on my emails and I get an email that says, hey, Barry, thanks for the quote on the rooms, we’re going to take them, I go, wow, how cool is that? And it doesn’t make a difference if it’s six rooms or 600 rooms. I just get jazzed by that.”
A Relationship Business
Barry’s advice for anyone who wants to work in entertainment without being on the road is to look at job boards, including industry-specific ones, and to find out which hotels book entertainment groups through organizations like Tour Connection.
But the real lesson of his career is the one he keeps coming back to throughout the episode: it’s a relationship business. With the group, the tour manager, the artist, and the travel agent.
“I’m a people person. I can’t remember anybody’s name, but I really am grateful for the relationships and seeing people. And I thrive on people.”
On the day of this recording, he was hosting a tour manager lunch. It wasn’t about sales. It was about tour managers sitting around a table, sharing stories, and meeting people they might not have known before. After nearly 25 years, that’s still what keeps him going.
