HB EXCLUSIVE

Brand’s New DayWelcome to Best Western Hotels & Resorts

Build your network Don’t forget about cellular coverage

Cater to your guestsCreating a culinary niche

VOLUME 24 NO. 16 SEPTEMBER 21, 2015

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cover story

20 | September 21, 2015 | hotelbusiness.com

By Stefani C. O’ConnorExecutive News Editor

Goodbye, Best Western Inter-national. Hello, Best Western Hotels & Resorts.

While not exactly a sea change, the board of directors of one of the world’s most-recognizable hotel brands has decided to give the nearly 70-year-old hotel association a revamped corporate name to better reflect its offerings.

The name change—confirmed to Hotel Business earlier this month—is one of several major initiatives the lodging chain plans to fully unwrap for its membership during its annual con-ference in Honolulu next week.

Best Western also plans to introduce a seventh brand that would fill a mid-scale boutique/lifestyle niche, as well as debut a revised master brand logo and new individual brand logos for Best Western, Best Western Plus and Best Western Premier.

The chain is also prepping the launch of a new mobile-booking experience, including a mobile website and apps for tablets and smartphones, part of a phased approach to its digital platform

that, in second quarter next year, will also see a new Bestwestern.com website.

According to Best Western execu-tives, the changes—a so-called brand reset—are the result of a decade of ac-complishments that has seen the brand morph to a different level in terms of offerings, quality and scope. The shifts are designed to get that message across not only to consumers, but to members and potential members as well.

“It’s not a dramatic change. We still have Best Western in the name. Changing out of the word Interna-tional for Hotels & Resorts is because we’ve been international for 30-some-thing years. Most people know we’re an international hotel company, so there’s not much bragging rights or aware-ness to be built. However, people don’t seem to know we have a lot of gorgeous resorts all around the world,” President and CEO David Kong told Hotel Busi-ness. “And, that’s something that we need to brag about and that we need to create awareness of. So, that’s why we want to change the name to Best Western Hotels & Resorts—to begin to create that awareness.”

Kong has been steering Best Western

since 2004, bringing stability at the ex-ecutive level that the brand often found elusive with other occupants of the C-Suite.

During his tenure, Best Western’s of-ferings have grown to six and include Best Western, Best Western Plus, Best Western Plus Executive Residency, Best Western Premier, Best Western Premier Collection and boutique concept Vib.

The CEO and his executive team also raised the bar on standards, culling some 1,200 properties and, by the end of next year, will have seen the invest-ment of more than $2 billion in PIPs and renovations by some 2,200 Best Western hotels in North America.

An industry-leading RevPAR Index (110, according to BW), a 4,200-prop-erty footprint worldwide and dozens of industry awards also bolster Kong’s belief that the timing is right for the changes ahead.

“There was no negativity associated with Best Western International. It was more a matter of what we wanted to be known for. Also, the worldwide sales clients had been telling us for a while now, ‘Hey, you guys need to take credit for what you have. That resort component is not something you’ve been telling us. You’re going to have to broadcast that more.’”

Best Western encompasses a wide

HB EXCLUSIVE

Brand’s New Day

Kong: The best is yet to come

David Kong posed for the cover of April 21, 2012 Hotel Business in front of the logos of Best Western and its descriptors, which will be called brands and have new logos when the company undergoes its refresh.

“ There was no negativity associated with Best Western International. It was more a matter of what we wanted to be known for.”

—David Kong

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range of property types—such as Eng-land’s Best Western Walworth Castle Hotel (circa 12th century) and the Best Western Plus Castle Inn, originally a traveler’s inn opened in 1770—which has been one of the factors making the brand eclectic years ahead of franchi-sors now layering in unique properties as part of a soft-brand portfolio.

Asked if the new name, now more spe-cific, would be able to umbrella all the offerings and convey the breadth of the brand, Kong unabashedly said, “No, but hopefully it creates intrigue and creates a curiosity, and has people starting to ask, ‘I wonder what else they have?’”

To alert the membership of the chang-es, the company has been conducting a series of about 40 Town Hall meetings ahead of next week’s convention, where all the details and images of the new logos will be unveiled.

“We want to keep our members as part of the process, so they’re not surprised and they buy into the future,” said Kong. “We also want to use those as op-portunities to collect feedback, so we can fine-tune our thinking.”

The CEO indicated, in all the Town Halls so far, “It’s been just overwhelm-ingly positive. People are very excited about all the changes; in particular, the name change.”

The change will be prominently dis-played to grab consumers’ attention, as well. “As soon as they come to our web-site, they’ll notice it right away. It’s going to be the headline at the top of the new website. Also, the new Best Western Rewards homepage has that banner on top to create that awareness. We have to hit on all the channels we have. Our Facebook page is going to be changed, our advertising campaigns, our vari-ous marketing activities will all start to incorporate that master brand,” said Kong, adding “It’s one step at a time” to wrangle such widespread change.

According to Dorothy Dowling, SVP/marketing and sales, it’s always a “very significant” challenge to reposition the brand. “There’s a certain amount of comfort in having a logo that will be 22 years old before the new logos come to life. Everyone leans into what’s familiar, and we’ve spent a lot of money building that familiarity and recognition with those customers. However, we want to be signaling this surprise, this delight, this ‘new’ about Best Western… We’re looking at all of our paid assets in terms of what we do in the advertising

space, but we’re also investing a lot in content… The challenge is always about the comfort that people have with the existing, and trying to ensure that they understand the ‘why’ and the complex-ity around that ‘why’ in terms of this brand refresh.”

While he doesn’t consider the name change “dramatic,” Kong does consider “very radical” the revamp of the logos that will identify Best Western, Best Western Plus and Best Western Pre-mier. “We are losing the shield, we are losing everything inside the shield… It’s modern. It’s very unusual. Nobody has a logo like the one [they’ll] see at conven-tion. It has some special effects on it.”

Kong, who declined to go into further detail pending the reveals at conven-tion, did discuss some costs.

“We anticipate, on average, hotels will spend anywhere from $20,000 to $80,000 for the sign changes. It just depends on how far they want to go,” he said.

Ron Pohl, SVP/brand management, noted discussion about the logos with members has been ongoing for about two years. “So, it’s not a surprise to them… We’re a very diverse brand in product and offerings but, at the same time, we know we have to provide greater consistency in the logo and the signage at the property level. It’s really getting them to understand that we don’t need to have a sign everywhere; less is more in that application. We re-ally need to represent the brand itself in a more significant way than we have in the past. They buy into that. They understand, at the end of the day, it’s the strength of the brand that drives the business to the hotel and certainly secures, not only the business they have today, but looking to next year, five years down the road, 10 years down the road, that we need to make this shift to be successful.”

Pohl indicated the “less-is-more” philosophy could be applied to a lot of traditional hotel collateral.

“A lot of messaging can be promoted electronically today in a number of dif-ferent applications. We are refining our brand identity manual that will reduce the number of logoed items throughout the hotel, throughout the property… It’s truly unnecessary to have a guest direc-tory or a trash can or any of the other million things in the guestroom that have been logoed in the past. The guest directory can be on the TV. It can be an

app that’s downloaded. We really want to take a cost-effective approach to this, and also understand that the customers know they’re staying in a Best Western once they walk in the door.”

As to the master brand logo, Kong said the company thought about where it would be used. “It’s not going to be a sign on top of a hotel. It’s going to ap-pear on our website, on Facebook and a lot of our channels. I’ve always liked things that are simple and elegant. We’ve taken that kind of approach to it,” said the CEO. “We know the whole world is going digital and, if you look at apps, the icons are all mostly just one letter or two letters: Facebook is f, Open Table is o. So we have to start introduc-ing the BW as our ligature, not just for the apps on an iPhone or whatever, but for the wearables of the future.”

While the name and master brand logo changes are done deals, members in November will vote on the logos for the three brands. Approval of the changes is expected.

All of the resets are slated for comple-tion by Dec. 31, 2017.

All Best Western products will be under the master brand. However, the CEO noted both the Vib brand, as well as the one it plans to launch, will main-tain distinct logos.

Like Vib, which expects to see a dozen products approved by year’s end, the proposed brand will be new-construc-tion only and will look to fill opportuni-ties where Vib does not fit well.

“[Vib] is really good for urban

locations where there’s a lot of foot traf-fic. It’s got a big lobby with five different zones. It’s got a lot of social space built into it. But, developers also are seeing the need for another boutique brand…where there may not be a lot of foot traf-fic, but there’s a lot of business and a lot of demand for hotel rooms,” said Kong.

After some research, Best Western ascertained a boutique/lifestyle play in the midscale segment represented a “big opportunity.” The company brain-stormed with some of its more pro-lific developers/members on what the

continued on page 22

Best Western Premier Herald Square, New York

Best Western Plus JFK Inn & Suites, Houston

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22 | September 21, 2015 | hotelbusiness.com

product should look like and where it would best fit.

“We’re definitely looking at secondary markets—like Pittsburgh downtown—[where] you don’t get a lot of foot traf-fic because they have a lot of condos, but that would be a great market for it… We don’t want just any market; we want a market for our target average rate of about $90,” said Kong.

There was a preview of the new con-cept at Best Western Governor’s Meet-ing, which is attended by the top 200 members. “Right away,” said Kong, “we had such great interest from that group wanting to develop it. So, they’re just waiting for us roll it out so they can see all the plans. Now, we’ve got the con-ceptual drawing, we’ve got the detailed floor plans. We have to put all the con-struction details with it. We know it’s going to cost about $65,000 [per key], which is really cost effective… The new design actually has center-loaded bath-rooms; that saves about 40 to 50 sq. ft. per guestroom…so, on a floor, you can add two or four guestrooms. You im-mediately create a lot of efficiency and your cost per key just goes down quite

dramatically,” said Kong. “And, because of our purchasing power and how we spec everything, you can have Her-man Miller chairs in this guestroom, you can have unique showerheads. The FF&E is really low by comparison to other brands.”

He said the prototype runs about 80 rooms across four floors with a “spec-tacular shape” and “striking” design.

While Kong did not reveal the name ahead of convention, he said: “When you see the design, you would get the name… I’m quite sure, as soon as we launch it, it’d be even more successful than Vib because the market’s not as restricted as [for] Vib.”

Restriction is not something Kong keeps in his vocabulary. As the global brand reset is implemented, he also sees brand expansion continuing at a quick pace.

“I think it’s really important to never limit how we think about our future, so I think about where we can grow and what we can do. I don’t see any limit. I think we are growing faster than most brands. In the Middle East, for ex-ample, where we already have 16 open; we’re going to add 20 hotels—open—next year. In South America, we’re one of the largest brands out there. Aside from Accor, we have the largest pres-ence. [In] Africa, the same thing. [In] Asia, we already have a very strong foothold in all the major countries. So, I don’t really see any limits to our growth potential,” he said.

“The culture of putting limits on our-selves is also something that we have changed,” he continued. “I often talk about [how] you have to have courage to dream big. Unless you can dream it, you can’t see it. If you can’t see it, you cannot make it happen. Once you dream big and can see your dreams, you can visualize your dreams and you can make it happen, and that’s come true time and again.”

While Kong pointed to the numerous awards the chain has won—which have been touted to the industry and con-sumers via its advertising campaigns—apparently, even something that’s “the best” isn’t good enough at the new Best Western Hotels & Resorts. For example, its award-winning website is getting the heave-ho in favor of “start-ing fresh,” according to the CEO.

“A lot of people approach the individ-ual hotel website, the mobile strategy and the dot-com as separate strategies.

We feel that there’s tremendous syn-ergy across all these applications, and we’re going to create a synergistic platform that would power all three,” he said.

Kong continued, “We just launched all the individual websites in North America—2,200 websites, more than 17,000-18,000 pages of content—in a few months’ timeframe. We are launch-ing our new mobile app. It’s got respon-sive and adaptive design, which means that the content will be optimally displayed regardless of your device. Next year, we’re going to launch a new Bestwestern.com, which would have a totally new look and feel and intuitive navigation to it. The dot-com is actual-ly gong to leverage a lot of Google prod-ucts…it has Adobe analytics built into it so we can analyze what’s going on and make quick changes to the website to optimize it. The platform is going to be very powerful in the future.”

Dowling noted the company is go-ing to have a set date when it starts to manage a lot of the consumer-facing touch points, “and, obviously, digital assets are a core part of that commu-nication platform. We have invested

an enormous amount in terms of a brand reset on our digital-owned channels to ensure we have a much more flexible platform, so we can be much more agile working with con-sumers because consumers are moving so quickly,” she said.

Best Western also is dropping the term descriptor to define its offerings, terminology it has insisted upon for years rather than calling them brands, which many in the industry considered an awkward reference.

“Our customers are telling us to call it what it is. The term brand is something they understand. The term descriptor is what our internal organization and our members understand. We have to be focused on our customers, we have to be customer centric, so we see the need,” said Kong.

Overall, said the CEO, “I think we’ve been on a really good run. We’ve ac-tually created a video to show at our convention showing all the achieve-ments we’ve made and the tremendous amount of awards we’ve won. I end the video with this tagline: ‘An amazing journey. The best is yet to come.’ And, that’s how I feel about the future.” HB

Vib lobby rendering

Rendering of a Best Western Plus Executive Residency lobby

continued from page 21

Ron Pohl

Dorothy Dowling

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