Meet the brothers betting hundreds of millions on a new vision for luxury hotels
As featured in The Australian WISH Magazine here | February 6, 2026 | BY KIM WILSON
Paul Salter, who heads up Salter Brothers hospitality division, talks expansion plans with InterContinental and how he and brother Robert balance their financial empire.
For a few days each year, Paul Salter and his brother Robert are twins. Technically, they’re Irish twins, born 360 days apart, but during that brief period, “we’re literally the same age,” Paul says with a laugh.
The brothers, aged 54 and 53, have lived much of their lives in lockstep. They shared kindergarten, then prep, after their mother marched to Essendon Grammar and insisted a howling Rob be allowed to enrol a year early so he could accompany Paul. They went on to Xavier College and eventually completed commerce degrees at the University of Melbourne.
Today, the Salter brothers lead Salter Brothers, the investment group behind one of the country’s most ambitious hotel upgrade initiatives. Paul is the managing director, and Rob is the chief executive; titles that reflect symmetry rather than hierarchy.
“Effectively, we’re co-chief executives,” Paul Salter says. “We don’t like the word ‘co’, so one takes one title, and the other takes the other. But the reality is, we run it together.”
While the brothers’ early years were identical, their professional paths diverged after university. “He went into commodities trading overseas and private wealth,” Salter says. “I went into corporate finance, then corporate at Crown, TAB in Canberra, then Ericsson Australia. Completely different experiences.”
Those differences now form neat halves of a whole. Rob oversees the trustee business, equities and capital markets, and the ultra-high-net-worth and multi-family office arm, the highly technical side of funds management, derivatives, hedging and capital allocation.
Paul’s focus is the tangible world of real estate and hotels. Within Salter Brothers’ four key pillars – funds management, trusteeship, capital markets, and private wealth – he directs the property-related strategies: real estate, credit and notably, a hotel portfolio of more than 45 properties across Australia.
“I’m the lead executive in the funds management business around the hotels,” he says. “That’s everything from liaising with the big third-party operators (IHG, Marriott, Accor, Hyatt) to working with our internal teams on the individual hotels, to our own boutique platform.”
It’s a set-up that works, largely thanks to the special resilience of their brotherly bond.
“We argue the best,” Salter admits. “His opinion and my opinion are sometimes the same, but more often different, and like 12-year-old boys, we’ll punch each other up. But the advantage is: no matter what I say to him, and no matter what he says to me, the next day it’s water off a duck’s back. We’re back to doing what we were doing the day before.”
In the course of the next decade, the partnership will transform some of the most significant hotel assets on Australia’s east coast, from Coogee Beach and the Yarra River to the heart of Canberra. The Salters are betting on a specific vision of the future: experiential, wellness-focused, deeply local luxury.
Crucially, they achieve this by transforming what already exists. “We’re actually not increasing supply with any of this,” Salter says. “Coogee, the Yarra, Canberra – these are about enhancing the experience and changing the dynamic of what’s already there, not just throwing more rooms at the market.”
In Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs, the Crowne Plaza Coogee has been reborn as an InterContinental, IHG’s flagship luxury brand.
“When people think Coogee, they think beach, surf, lifestyle,” Salter says. “There’s been a big global shift, accelerated by covid, towards travelling for experiences. People want to spend time with people they care about, in places that feel special.”
To meet that shift, the hotel has undergone a major transformation, with fully upgraded rooms and a new destination restaurant by Rick Stein, which had booked 10,000 reservations before its opening in December. There is also a luxury wellness centre and refurbished meeting and event spaces.
“Wellness isn’t a fad anymore,” he says. “Putting a yoga mat in the room doesn’t cut the mustard. People want real facilities.”
Moving from a 4.5-star Crowne Plaza to a five-star InterContinental also opens new global channels. “In luxury travel, ranking matters,” Salter says. “A five-star badge changes the rate you can charge and the audience you attract.”
The brothers’ most ambitious work. however, is happening on two prominent sites in their native Melbourne.
The riverside Crowne Plaza, which sits directly on the Yarra River, will soon transform into a flagship InterContinental following a nearly $100 million makeover.
“Look up and down the river; no hotel sits on the Yarra quite like that asset,” Salter says. “The views alone give you a massive advantage.”
Key upgrades include a new rooftop offering two experiences: a restaurant by a three-Michelin-starred chef and a top-tier InterContinental Club Lounge.
The crown jewel of their redevelopment plans, however, is reserved for Collins Street. The InterContinental at the Rialto will be transformed into the Regent Melbourne, IHG’s ultra-luxury “hero” brand.
The existing site, a patchwork of true heritage wings fronting Collins Street and Flinders Lane, and a 1980s faux-heritage tower in between, will be reimagined as a mixed-use precinct including retail, a 200-suite Regent hotel, premium offices and a rooftop restaurant looking out over the Yarra.
On Flinders Lane, an original cobblestoned horse-and-carriage U-turn, currently hidden under years of fit-outs, will be reinstated as the heart of a laneway-style retail precinct. Collins Street’s current mish-mash of stores will be replaced with a more curated luxury mix.
But it’s a standalone, five-level corner tower that houses one of the project’s most intriguing elements, a new private members club.
“Think Soho House,” Salter says. “There’ll be a cinema, wellness, restaurants, a billiards room. We’re still working through the exact model, but it’ll be distinctive. Not a men’s club, Melbourne has enough of those, but a proper modern club.”
There will be a strong wine focus, too, with Salter referencing the arrival of members-only club 67 Pall Mall Melbourne, opening later this year in a landmark site above parliament Station.
“We want that same sense of a place people belong to,” Salter says. “If you’ve got an office upstairs, you’ve got this club you can attach to as well, it becomes part of your daily life.” It’s a “hundreds of millions” investment, with at least 12 months of design work and a three-and-a-half to four-year build, and an expected opening of 2030.
In Canberra, the existing Crowne Plaza site, next to the convention centre, will become a new accommodation, residential and lifestyle precinct. “There’s not a lot of true five-star product in Canberra,” Salter says. “You come up short pretty quickly.” The plan includes a new InterContinental, Hotel Indigo (IHG’s lifestyle brand) and two new residential towers.
Salter believes the brothers’ approach to their business aligns squarely with major international travel trends.
“There is absolutely a global trend toward experiential travel,” he says. “Every research report lists experiences and wellness in the top five drivers.”
Threaded throughout this is a desire to ground the experience in Australia. The group is launching its own wellness brand, Éliva, starting in Coogee and then expanding to regional properties and the new Melbourne hotels.
“We are so fortunate; I don’t think we realise how good the lifestyle and product here are, or how much we have to showcase to the rest of the world.”
Despite the scale of the developments, Salter talks about family with more animation than he uses for talking about hotels.
He has three adult children: a 25-year-old daughter, Hannah, who works in marketing within the hotel business; 23-year-old son, Oscar, who is completing a commerce degree; and his 19-year-old, Angus, who has just finished a gap year.
As for the idea they’ll one day take over the family business, he’s philosophical. “The expectation is they inherit nothing,” Salter says.
“If there’s something to inherit one day, great, but they’ve got to make their own way. The key thing is trajectory, not precision. Just go upwards. Be active, be present, be interesting.”
For all the sophistication of the group’s strategy, the brand architecture, the capital planning, the luxury repositioning, it’s hard not to return to the image of two boys in matching school uniforms, inseparable even in kindergarten.
“We always said we’d work together,” Salter says. “There’s no doubt I couldn’t have done any of this without him, and equally, he couldn’t have done it without me.”