Choice Hotels International executives are feeling good. And they’re looking to ride the current the travel market upswing with a slew of new initiatives design to appeal to both consumers and hotel developers.
This week, the hotel franchise company held its annual conference in fabulous Las Vegas Nevada where the company’s President and CEO Steve Joyce said it’s all steam ahead on positive momentum.
“We think things are generally moving in the right direction. The numbers are good and franchisees are feeling good about where [the market] is going. We are getting closer to 2007 levels and preaching we are in for a pretty good run for the next three years,” said Joyce.
Already Choice Hotels is enjoying the upswing as it sees continued upward mobility for all key industry benchmarks like RevPAR, Occupancy and ADR. And Joyce thinks the market will continue upward as consumer confidence shifting back up. “We have a lot of folks [potential customers] looking at our brands for the first time
“Leisure is the story this year and that bodes well for Choice since we are about two-thirds leisure. We represent the 99% of folks out there and we represent value,” said Joyce.
Click listen to hear the full Steve Joyce and David Pepper interview on Hotel Interactive Radio.
Pat Pacious, EVP Global Strategy, Distribution and Technology, said choicehotels.com is setting new records. More than 100 million people checked the site in 2011 as the company has been deploying more tools to get more traffic to the website and convert them to room renters.
Additionally, the website has seen nine days this year with sales of $ 10 million or more. Typically the first $ 10 million day comes in July, but this year the company had the first one in February.
The company is also feeling pretty good about the development side of the business with Joyce citing franchising income up 15 percent in the first quarter. “Hotels are starting to trade and hands and when they trade hands we get a shot,” said Joyce.
David Pepper, Choice’s SVP, Global Development is also sensing the tides have shifted. “People are looking to buy properties. We are feeling positive, conversions are up and new construction opportunities are opening too,” said Pepper.
Pepper said there’s a hotbed of development occurring in certain places like the Dakota’s thanks to a super strong oil business. And Choice has a new way to leverage that opportunity, a new prototype that marries the Sleep Inn & MainStay Suites brands into a single prototype that share a lobby and back of house to help lower operating costs. “Guests in certain markets are either looking for just a room or a place to stay for long time,” said Pepper.
Pepper said the Ascend Collection is really gaining traction too. The brand is on track to debut more than one a month this year and already has 71 open in many markets where there is no other Choice brand represented. “Soft branding works really well for urban boutique properties and for us too in markets where we typically don’t have a lot of products but have a lot of demand in those locations. We can drive lot of business and we save a lot of cost for these hotels,” said Pepper.
During the conference Choice announced the Lady Luck Hotel located in downtown Las Vegas has added their 150 rooms into the Ascend Collection.
Some of the most significant news coming out of the conference was a new F&B program for Cambria Suites. As the brand continues to make incremental gains into new markets such as Washington, D.C., New York and Miami, executives are looking to help existing hotels make more money per guest. They also have a deal for properties in Boston and across from Disneyland in Anaheim.
So the brand unveiled new menus that are meant to keep guests in house rather than lose them to outside restaurants. New menu items focus on American comfort cuisine with an emphasis on cross utilization of ingredients so hotels can offer more choices without adding layers of cost and food waste.
“This idea came from existing owners because they needed more profitability so we put owners together and hired high quality talent to help in this space. This is what America is asking for and the burger will be the key driver,” said Michael Murphy, SVP Cambria Suites and Ascend Collection, who added the company has switched more traditional brand team to a marketing/branded hybrid where they go to each hotel quarterly to assist in helping the hotels perform.
Cambria just finished its best quarter ever, said Murphy, with RevPAR growing nine percent in Q1 2012.
Alex Jarits, SVP Brand Strategy and Marketing, reported that Sleep Inn hotels that have already made the switch to the new Designed to Dream refresh program are on average getting a $ 10 RevPAR premium per night on rate. So far 65 hotels have completed the program with more than 100 currently undergoing renovation or construction.
Click listen to hear the full Steve Joyce and David Pepper interview on Hotel Interactive Radio.
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