Adventurous Journeys Capital Partners (AJ Capital Partners) is a private real estate company based in Chicago. It owns and operates lodging accommodations throughout the United States, the Caribbean and Mexico.
AJ Capital Partners was founded by Ben Weprin, the current CEO, in 2008. Its strategy was to build a portfolio of hotels and resorts. Its projects have included restorations of existing hotels and development of new properties, many of them located in Chicago, such as Thompson Chicago and WeWork, a company that provides shared office space.
It also owns or has owned or invested in historic hotels and resorts, including the Pontchartrain Hotel in New Orleans, Isle de France in St. Barth and Malliouhana, part of Auberge Resorts, in Anguilla, with several locations, primarily in the U.S.
In 2012, AJ Capital Partners collaborated with Soho House Group to transform a vacant rubber belt factory located in Chicago's West Loop into a Soho House, an urban, members only club and hotel, which opened in 2014.
In 2015, AJ Capital Partners were the developers in restoring the 130-year-old Chicago Athletic Association into a public hotel. Weprin’s investment partner for the $150 million project included financier John Pritzker. The company also owned the Hotel Lincoln in Chicago, which was sold to Jordache Enterprises for a reported $70 million in 2016.
AJ Capital Partners launched the Graduate Hotels division in 2014. The name comes from the company's plan to develop boutique hotels in university town markets across the country. The hotels are intended to cater to college students and their families and are located near universities. As of 2016, there were six hotels in the division located in Athens, Georgia; Tempe, Arizona; Madison, Wisconsin; Charlottesville, Virginia; Oxford, Mississippi; and Ann Arbor, Michigan. An additional three hotels are scheduled to open spring/summer 2017 in Berkeley, California; Richmond, Virginia; and Lincoln, Nebraska. In February 2017, the brand announced plans to expand to Minneapolis, Minnesota; Seattle, Washington; and Bloomington, Indiana by 2018.
In 2016, AJ Capital Partners added two upper level executives: Tim Franzen was appointed president of the Graduate Hotels division, and Cooper Manning, who has his own show on Fox Sports, is the son of former National Football League quarterback Archie Manning and brother of New York Giants quarterback Eli Manning and former NFL quarterback Peyton Manning, was named senior managing director—investor relations.