Hyatt’s scores for sales empowerment and partnership approach to corporate travel were other highlights for the brand. Vonderheide said the pandemic taught the company how to be more creative and tune into what the client really needs and how to look at what a specific company is bringing to the table.

“We look so much at the individual opportunity,” he said. “And I’m totally sincere about that. We don’t just blanket a percent [rate increase] out there and say, ‘We’re going to hit X.’”

That approach, according to Vonderheide, has allowed Hyatt to gain market share among the corporate travel set—especially now as companies get back to traveling in earnest.

“We’ve been offering six or eight pricing models from traditional static rates, which no one really wanted during the pandemic, to full dynamic and everything in between. We offered some float-to-discounts, some float-to-BAR [best available rate]. We offered some hybrid opportunities.”

BTN’s 2023 hotel program trend survey showed corporate buyers will continue to look for a variety of rate structures going in to 2024, with leisure travel still going strong and pushing occurpancy. To combat that situation, more corporate buyers are looking to consolidate with fewer suppliers.

In that environment, said Vonderheide, Hyatt’s focus on opportunity analysis and flex is paying off. He cited banking, professional services, pharmaceutical and tech companies as making some of the strongest business travel gains in recent months and as industries where Hyatt is capturing more share.

Asked how he saw rates moving in the coming months, Vonderheide’s response was a matter of fact. “Occupancies are strong right now. Lengths of stays are growing… people are staying longer, which is great. So the basics of supply and demand come into play,” intimating that rates at Hyatt aren’t coming down any time soon.

“We are very, very loyal and conscious of the value of our corporate clients,” he drove home. “We walk a fine line this time of year [the RFP season] to deliver value to our business travel clients and drive the right business to our [property] owners and operators. People talk about a buyers’ or a sellers’ market. The way we look at it, it’s a partnership market, and that’s where we’re going to win this year.”

Hilton Shines in Innovation & Digitization

Hilton Hotels & Resorts’ second-place finish represents consistently competitive scores across all survey criteria. Corporate travel buyers rated it higher than 5 on six-point scale for strategic locations and brand diversity to meet business needs, safety and security standards and for product quality and consistency across the brand portfolio.

Hilton tied for first place in product innovation and digitization, in which Hilton has pursued a number of business trends among business and leisure travelers.

“There is no right, one-size-fits-all approach to customer-centric innovation,” Hilton SVP and global sales head Frank Passanante said in a press statement linked to the company's 2023 trend and innovation outlook. “We know our customers are looking for more efficient ways of doing business and, as trusted partners and leaders in the industry, it is our job to listen loudly, understand their goals and evolve to meet their needs.”

CEO Chris Nassetta consistently has identified groups and meetings as powerhouse revenue stream for Hilton in the post-pandemic era. As a result, Hilton has enhanced its Events.Hilton.com with expanded search filters, improved account portals and broader options for customizations. Additionally, the company has leaned into its LightStay program for both transient and corporate groups, for those companies looking to understand the environmental impact of their business travel and meetings.

The brand also has leaned heavily into digital keys, enabling them through the Hilton Honors mobile app at approximately 80 percent of its nearly 7,300 properties, allowing guests connected to the app to bypass front desk check in. Across the brand portfolio, Hilton estimates it reduced physical key usage by 7.9 million plastic cards in the first six months of June 2022 as travelers returned from the pandemic. The company continues to expand the capability and number of rooms covered with its “Connected Room” concept launched in 2017.

Hilton’s most recent innovation also hits environment, sustainability and governance notes and stems from a mobile app filter the hotel company enabled in 2021 to allow travelers to search specifically for hotels with electric vehicle charging stations. Hilton found that a successful search for a property with an EV charging station was a leading indicator of whether the search would lead to a booking.

As more travelers—both business and leisure—arrive in EVs, Hilton has partnered with EV manufacturer Tesla to roll out 20,000 EV charging stations across 2,000 locations in North America, starting in 2024.

Meetings Outperform at Marriott

It comes as no surprise that Marriott International’s 8,500-plus properties and, at last count, 32 brands across traditional and extended stay hotels would deliver the top rating on “strategic locations to meet business needs” among BTN’s corporate travel manager audience. Indeed, at 5.48 on a six-point scale, this was the highest individual rating captured by any hotel across all survey criteria.

“We wake up every day feeling so grateful that we have this portfolio of brands to sell,” said Marriott SVP global sales Tammy Routh. “We are able to go to our customers with every price point and every trip purpose—and have choices available pretty much everywhere.”

That bounty requires informed, consultative selling for the Marriott team.

“You can’t throw that [portfolio] at a customer and say, ‘Hey, pick what you need,’” Routh acknowledged. “The sole job of our global sales teams is to know the customer so intimately that [sales] takes that portfolio and … [makes] it very customized for them.”

Marriott in the past 18 months, has incorporated more outsourced resources to support sales needs like data entry and, on the meetings side, has shifted to a specialized team the catering-only business that has grown considerably but doesn’t necessarily need deeper product expertise Marriott dedicates to corporate clients.

“Outsourcing strategies and being able to specialize certain business with other teams has helped us prioritize the most important opportunities,” said Routh.

Among those most critical opportunities for Marriott has been meetings and events, about which Marriott president and CEO Anthony Capuano in the company’s most recent earnings call said “revenue was pacing up 14 percent for next year, year over year.”

“We are not successful without really strong meetings and events, and also business travel,” said Routh, despite the surge in leisure travel. “Most of our hotels aren’t built to be filled only with leisure business; because of that, it’s never going to displace our special corporate and group.”

BTN’s Hotel Survey respondents rated Marriott highest for supporting corporate meetings and events. The company has put a lot of focus here, said Routh, ensuring training for the meetings and events teams is always robust, delivering attention to rising calls for turnkey sustainability options for the larger events business and also working on ways to reward meeting planners with Bonvoy loyalty benefits.

Marriott has also innovated around serving smaller events, which have become a bigger piece of the business and are coming through with shorter and shorter lead times.  

“Smaller meetings are something that we are trying to solve for on behalf of our own company and on behalf of customers,” she said. “We are one of the hotel companies invested in Group 360’s Group Sync,” which is an instant-book meetings solution that a number of major hotel groups have supported. To date, Marriott is among the only brands that has integrated “at scale” with the platform, counting 1,500 properties on the tool as of January. “If we can get something like that with momentum, it changes everything. Automation in that space takes a huge amount of work off everyone’s plate.”

Like Hyatt’s Vonderheide, Routh has seen an increase in companies merging meetings volume with business travel as they come to the negotiating table for 2024, and that is playing to Marriott’s brand and portfolio strength. As a sales team looking for holistic partnerships, having visibility into meetings spend—both large and small gatherings—can make a meaningful difference.

“There will be some hotels that, when the team knows there's meetings and events that could be held at their hotel, it will change their whole opinion on offering a business travel rate,” said Routh.

Routh acknowledged Marriott’s position as “rate leader.” The brand received its lowest scores from corporate travel managers on the partnership approach to corporate business criteria, which specifically asks respondents to consider the supplier’s rate flexibility.  

“We want to make sure the rate is highly valued in terms of value for price paid,” Routh said, and valued on the part of the hotel owner or franchisee as well. “If we are the rate leader, we will then be the ones owners and franchisees come to first and want to do business with. That is good for our customers and goes back to [having locations and choice] everywhere they need to be.”

IHG Prioritizes Corporate Insights and Transparency

U.K.-headquartered IHG Group, the parent company of 19 brands and nearly 6,000 locations worldwide, made its mark in BTN’s survey tying the survey leader in the partnership approach to corporate business criteria and quality of data and reporting criteria. It posted the highest marks among all hotels in the survey for rate availability and transparency.

That last point is one that has taken high priority in the 2024 negotiation season, according to SVP of IHGs global sales operation Mark Sergot.

“Our corporate customers are expecting higher travel volumes in 2024 and their key concern is securing rooms to enable their travelers to stay and work effectively,” he said, even in highly compressed business centers like New York, London and Boston where hotel rates are riding high. He also said buyers were dialed into the criticality of added-value benefits from loyalty and ensuring their rates were loyalty eligible to drive more traveler satisfaction.

In the elevated rate environment, however, corporate customers are following data more closely and looking to hotel partners to help provide a holistic view of hotel utilization and spend. According to BTN survey respondents, IHG has shown itself as a leader in this space—and the company has paid close attention to its offerings here.

In the days leading up to the Covid-19 shutdown, IHG launched what it called its Customer Insights Portal. BTN wrote about the dashboard rollout on Jan. 22, 2020.

The tool offers corporate travel managers a view into brand and location utilization—city, state and region—as well as booking channel, allowing users to see whether their travelers are booking through global distribution systems, central reservations offices, directly through IHG hotels, its website or app or other methods.

At the time it launched, users told BTN the dashboard represented “a pivot and will set the bar for other hotels to engage and do the same thing." Unfortunately, the portal barely had an opportunity to provide corporate clients with any data before the entire industry came to a halt.

Now that business travel is back—Sergot said IHG has seen “double-digit on-the-books growth versus 2022 globally” for enterprise business travel going into fall—the insights portal is in for a major workout.

“One of the core parts of IHG’s sales culture is our ambition to help our clients succeed, both in the short- and long term,” said Sergot. The data tool is one example of the company responding to corporate needs. Sergot said the team is always looking to provide solutions that will support corporate relationships.  

“We’re listening to our customers and connecting to our industry, to keep pace with evolving priorities and technologies,” he added. “We approach our customers and partners in a spirit of mutual growth, seeking to find the win-win in each relationship.”

One wildcard that has the potential to enhance—or detract—from corporate programs is IHG’s new fee-based personalization strategy it introduced earlier this month for travelers booking direct on its website.

As part of a website and booking refresh that will expand across the portfolio in the coming months in collaboration with tech partner Amadeus, the “redesigned” booking workflow enables users to choose individual room attributes, including pre-paid parking, food and beverage credits, room floor, specific view and in-room amenities. Some attributes will include an additional fee—not unlike the airline retailing the travel industry has seen in recent years.

Room attribute capabilities are now available at more than 5,000 IHG hotels, and more than 100 hotels will have "stay enhancements" live by the end of 2023, the company shared in the release.

How those personalization enhancements will—or will not—be available through agency and corporate booking channels is in question. If they are available, how buyers might choose to wrap policy around that spend could add complexity to the programs. If managed corporate programs do not have access to such personalization—fee-based or not—it could provide one more reason for corporate travelers to book away from managed channels. On the other hand, if the Corporate Insights Portal can deliver granular data per booking channel, corporate travel buyers could have access to a treasure trove of data to inform their programs.

Accor Group’s Modern Vision

French hotel giant Accor Group, which concentrates its more than 5,100 locations mostly in Europe and Asia Pacific, made it to BTN’s corporate travel podium, even among corporate travel managers largely based in North America but who nevertheless tap into Accor’s 40-plus brand portfolio.

Accor’s high-end Fairmont, which leans into historic luxury properties, MGallery and 21c are the most pervasive in the company’s 108-property U.S. portfolio. Located in key city centers, they fill a need for a more luxury-focused business traveler but also hold a strong reputation for meetings and events.

That’s a purposeful strategy the company has taken for the U.S., preferring to grow its “Luxury & Lifestyle” properties—like Fairmont, MGallery and Sofitel—in the region as opposed to its “Economy, Midscale & Premium Division,” which includes brands like Ibis, Mercure, Novotel and Pullman of which there are just a handful in North America but have an incredibly robust footprint throughout Europe.

Accor Group chairman and CEO Sebastien Bazin takes a decidedly modern approach to attracting corporate travel business, leaning way into hospitality and local culture and community. Speaking at the company’s 2023 Global Meeting Exchange in July he said that business travel and leisure was “impossible” to segment (outside of the meetings and events business) and to attract either type hotel companies must create experiences for locals and travelers alike and work to become community anchors.

"The welcoming, the lobby, the bar, the restaurant, the people you meet. … It's all this hospitality we've missed for so many years," Bazin said, characterizing quality hotel guest rooms and workspaces as table stakes in attracting the right clients and creating the right experiences for them. Even in the midscale the company has demonstrated this commitment with brands like Ibis Styles, which the company describes as “instagrammable.”

The decidedly international hotel company received the highest marks from BTN survey respondents on its attention to traveler safety and security—beating all other companies in this survey on this mark.