Corporate travel buyers are placing a high value on traveler experience, as illustrated by BTN’s 2015 Hotel Brand Survey, in which buyers gave top marks to brands that have made an effort to deliver.
BTN’s survey ranked brands across seven tiers. Of the first place finishers, only two were repeat winners from 2014: Best Western Plus and InterContinental Hotels Group’s Candlewood Suites. Additionally, no multibrand company had more than one first place finisher.
Overall, Marriott International had the strongest performance, with five brands—Ritz-Carlton, Marriott, SpringHill Suites, Residence Inn and TownePlace Suites—ranking in the top three in their tiers. Starwood Hotels & Resorts and Hyatt Hotels each had three brands finish in
the top three of their respective tiers, while IHG and Hilton Worldwide each had two.
Check out the entire report, including charts of the survey results,
here.
Keeping Pace With Trends
All the first place brands in this year’s survey have some form of mobile app. Four Seasons, which placed first in the luxury segment, was the most recent to add one, in June.
Bjorn Hanson, a clinical professor at New York University’s Tisch Center for Hospitality and Tourism, said a hotel’s app can be a bellwether of brand philosophy. “The apps are representative of a brand’s attitude as perceived by travelers or corporate buyers or meeting planners,”
Hanson said. “Often, the companies that have the apps have also done things with food and beverage concepts or lobby functionality, such as high-speed Internet access. It’s more part of a package of them trying to respond to younger travelers.”
Indeed, the leading brands in each tier have made efforts to appeal to modern travelers and Millennials, investing in more than just new pillows and better breakfasts. “If you look at what we’ve learned from really studying the next-generation traveler, they’ve grown up combining business and
leisure,” said Janis Milham, Marriott senior vice president of modern essentials and extended-stay brands. “They combine work and play all the time, so we’ve had to think about our designs, our decor, our rooms, our lobbies, in combining elements of those. It’s table stakes these days.”
The U.S. lodging industry’s investment in improvements like new in-room amenities, faster Internet and upgraded technology systems in 2015 is expected to total $6.4 billion, a 7 percent year-over-year increase, according to an analysis by the NYU Tisch Center. Among the most expensive
changes that brands required in 2015 were changes to bathrooms and replacing tubs with walk-in showers, new or enhanced fitness facilities and redesigned lobbies geared toward Millennials.
“Brand consistency used to mean every hotel looked the same,” Hanson said. “Now, brand consistency means the experience is more the same. In general, whether it’s Westin or Hyatt Place or Springhill Suites, those create a very uniform experience, and … I don’t mean the color of the
wallpaper in the lobby. It’s just kind of the feel and attitude of the property.”
Brands that heighten that guest experience and provide a consistent product will maintain positive relationships with travel buyers as corporate hotel rates climb. While Advito, the consulting arm of BCD Travel, projects hotel rates in North America to rise between 4 percent and 6 percent,
NYU’s Tisch Center expects hikes of 6.5 percent to 7.5 percent, the upper end of which would mark the largest increase in three decades.
Methodology
For its annual Hotel Brand Survey, BTN emailed readers who are responsible for corporate hotel-buying decisions, asking them to rate hotels, arranged by tier, with which they have conducted business in the past year.
The survey bases hotel-tier divisions on price-point data provided by STR Global and on industry knowledge of how buyers relate with specific brands. Buyers rated hotels on as many as 12 attributes on an ascending scale from one to six. The highest average score for each attribute is emphasized.
The data is based on 283 respondents. BTNreported results only for hotel tiers and brands with significant respondent usage.
This report originally appeared in the Oct. 12, 2015
edition of Business Travel News.