As travelers demand both authenticity and consistency in their hotel stays, soft brands are evolving to meet their expectations. BWH Hotels, popularly known as Best Western, has been growing its own soft-brand portfolio to capture market share and bring in new franchise members who may not fit in one of the company’s hard brands.
All segments in hospitality need to be managed differently, said Brad LeBlanc, senior vice president and chief development officer at BWH Hotels, noting that BWH considers its soft brands to be a distinct division within its broader portfolio. BWH Hotels’ soft-brand vertical consists of WorldHotels at the luxury and upper-upscale level, Premier Collection in the upscale category, Signature Collection in the upper-midscale and midscale categories and SureStay Collection in the economy segment.
BWH Hotels has a $9 billion global system that fuels that independent collection, LeBlanc said, estimating that the company’s soft-branded portfolio to be at about 650 properties. “That puts us just behind Marriott,” he noted, predicting that the two companies would have the same number of soft-branded hotels by the end of the year.
A soft brand, LeBlanc continued, lets an independent hotel “latch on to a global distribution system” while maintaining their independence and focus. “[They can] keep everything that they do at a local level,” he noted, adding that the connection to a large-scale brand provides the property with a “backbone, an extension cord [or] a power cord to a global set of eyes.”
Amy Hulbert, the company’s vice president of boutique and upscale brands, oversees seven of BWH’s brands including everything in the upscale segment, the boutique brands and some of the extended-stay business. “From the time the application comes in, we start to partner with the owners, all the way through to operations support,” Hulbert said.
Owners, Hulbert said, want to have their “fingerprint” on their properties. “They want to make sure that what they want gets executed. … We partner with them to keep that steady, which I think differentiates us from our competition.” That, she added, is what makes BWH’s five soft-brand collections “one of the biggest growth engines that we have in the company.”
The “lighter brand touch" is increasingly popular as hotels look to balance consistency with individuality, Hulbert noted. “It's really our joy to work with all these developers because they have such great ideas,” she said. “We're energized by them because they bring so much to the table.” As a partner, BWH Hotels aims to work with each owner to determine exactly what they need—and every deal is different, Hulbert added. “Some people need more help in certain areas and want more of our assistance … And some people are like, ‘You know what, just connect me and make sure I'm doing what you want from a brand perspective.’ And they're off and running.”
LeBlanc estimated that his team brings approximately 15 deals across all brands to BWH Hotels’ Board of Directors each month for consideration. Of those deals, 40 percent are Collections brands.
Independence vs. Standards
A soft brand, by its nature, does require some brand standards from its member hotels, but Hulbert noted that each property needs to be considered in its own right. “When you're forcing [standards] on something that inherently has a good path, you're basically cutting that [path] off and trying to re-divert [it].” Ultimately, she said, those standards may not make a significant difference to the guest experience.
As such, BWH Hotels treats some of its soft-brand standards “pretty loose,” Hulbert said. For example, while hotels in the Premier Collection should have a food and beverage “experience,” there are “lots of different ways” to approach the requirement.
LeBlanc offered a different example, noting a Utah hotel from 1901 that the team wanted to join a collection. The property had maintained a number of its historic elements, and some people in the organization were looking for ways to modernize it. When the owner expressed skepticism at fixing what wasn’t broken, LeBlanc and Hulber supported him. “It's our way of helping owners deliver preservation,” LeBlanc said. “But if the owner does want to modernize it, Amy’s team is there to help.”
Next Steps
BWH Hotels’ next steps are “real simple," LeBlanc said: “We're gonna keep doing what we're doing. Because it's working.” There are thousands of independent hotels and hoteliers out there, he continued. “They're trying to figure out what to do with those assets—how to revive them, how to make them lively again—and plugging them into the global distribution system is just one way.”
By looking at a wider range of hotels in a range of global markets, LeBlanc expects BWH to gain a foothold in places other companies might miss. “Conversion is king and a lot of these locations can't be beat,” he said. “People are looking to either reposition or at least renovate and [create] a new face for a hotel. And this is a great opportunity for us to partner with them and get them into one of the collections.”