A successful franchising strategy should ensure “there is a brand for every owner and a brand for every guest,” according to Amit Sripathi, EVP and chief development officer, Wyndham Hotels & Resorts. “Gen Z and Millennials are very different from Baby Boomers and what they want in terms of a hotel room,” he notes.
“As a franchisor, we've got 25 different brands and over 9,200 hotels across the world. It’s about making sure that the owners are taken care of at different price points, and guests are too. Our mission is making hotel travel possible for all,” Sripathi said.
Brand Choice
Barbara Purvis, president of white label operator Essex Hotel Management, adds that in a landscape of “a thousand brands” her firm seeks to focus on “trying to navigate the landscape of different options in working with owners… making sure that the terms are fair and reasonable.” "What’s different today is that we have soft brands and independent options as well as hard brands.”
James Carroll, president and CEO of independent hotel management firm Crestline Hotels & Resorts, said that demand is a key starting point for his firm when working with owners. “When we're evaluating with an ownership group what brand they should put on the hotel, we definitely look at the demand landscape. What is the demand in that market based on the type of hotel you have, which part of that demand are you trying to attract, or you think that you can grow the most with?”
He agreed with Purvis that the vast panorama of options – “a thousand plus brands out there to choose from” – means that managers must have a good understanding of factors like demand profile and guest type to be able to narrow down their selection.
Once that clarity has been reached, “you can look at the particular product you're building, how it might fit in the designs of the different brands that are available, and negotiate with some of the different brands based on what they already have in the market,” evaluating, for example, “what kind of incentives they might want to put your way, or how available some of their sub-brands are, and try to pick that optimal choice.”
To read the rest of this article, visit our sister site Hospitality Investor.