Rosen Hotels & Resorts announced a new guest staying in its CEO suite. The company said CFO and Vice President Frank Santos will step up to the CEO position following last week’s death of founder Harris Rosen.
Santos, a 38-year veteran of the company, said his leadership will follow the footsteps and demeanor of his longtime colleague.
“Generous, kind and available,” he said of Rosen.
At the start of Tuesday’s press conference where the change was announced, Santos made two things clear: he will not sell the company, and he will not abandon Rosen’s philanthropic ways.
“He left me with pretty clear instructions of what the future would look like,” Santos said.
Rosen reached out to Santos in 1985 for the chief financial officer position, which he began one year later.
Since his hiring, Santos said he committed to Rosen’s business ventures and community development. He helped develop a program that provides free preschool education for children in the Tangelo Park and Parramore areas. The program also gives college and vocational scholarships.
More than 500 students have received college scholarships through the program, according to Rosen Hotels & Resorts.
The pair also established RosenCare – a healthcare program with no deductibles for the company’s more than 4,000 employees.
The succession plan did not come as a surprise to Santos, as he said Rosen had laid nearly everything out. The timing, however, caught him off guard.
“None of us expected him to not make it out of this surgery,” he said.
Rosen died Nov. 25 at age 85 due to complications during a surgical treatment for cancer. He left Santos with the southeast’s largest independently owned hotel chain.
Moving forward, Santos has a vision for some future projects. He said the late Rosen wanted to redevelop or add to the company’s existing properties on International Drive. This includes planned expansions to Rosen Shingle Creek and the Rosen Centre that were delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
He was unsure if the projects would be completed over his tenure as CEO, but said he’ll work to make them happen.
“There’ll probably be a day where I may not work every day, but I’ll always have my thumb on things,” he said.
Santos added he is surprisingly calm following the death of his friend and the promotion to his new role, but he is ready to continue Rosen’s work.
