CHARLOTTE, N.C. — A number of leaders from BWH Hotels shared updates on new initiatives and benchmarks during the company’s annual convention, held here at the city’s convention center this week.
BWH, Board Chairman Phil Payne told an estimated 3,000 attendees, is “the only major hotel company” that is both owned and managed by its members—“with the sole purpose of serving and advancing the interests of our members and hotels. We do not answer to, or send profits back to, a separate group of shareholders.”
While mergers and acquisitions have become ubiquitous across the industry in recent years, Payne assured the attendees that the company was not for sale. “We changed our governing documents to require a two-thirds majority vote to even entertain that idea,” he noted, thanking everyone in the room who voted in favor of that change.
Glamping
The company’s Premier Collection now includes the Explorer Series, a line of “glamping” (glamorous camping) facilities in top wilderness destinations. The Wildflower Zion (Utah) Resort will be the first property in the series when it reopens for the season in March.
With travel becoming “more and more experiential,” according to Brad LeBlanc, senior vice president and chief development officer, the glamping component will help BWH keep pace with competitors like Hilton and Hyatt. The former partnered with AutoCamp earlier this year, while the latter added glamping options at Under Canvas' 13 resorts this past summer.
The Wildflower resort will have both tents and covered wagons. Some accommodations will have private bathrooms while others will have access to shared facilities, as in traditional campsites. All will have Wi-Fi and electricity.
Future Explorer Series properties are slated for Montana and upper Utah, LeBlanc said. President and CEO Larry Cuculic said that within hours of the announcement during the general session, “multiple leads” had reached out to discuss opportunities.
Extended-Stay
Nearly two years since the company announced its foray into the extended-stay segment with the @Home Brand, “extended-stay absolutely rules the day,” LeBlanc told the attendees, estimating that the segment now makes up 33 percent of the overall pipeline and 5.5 percent of the market—“well above every other section."
The new brand has 23 deals signed and a further 25 applications for new projects. "I believe that we're on the cusp of an expansion that we haven't seen in a long time,” LeBlanc said. “I believe with suppressed supply growth, with aging inventory [and] with a growing shift in the population base, we're on the cusp of something huge in this industry."
Loyalty
Joelle Park, BWH’s new senior vice president and chief marketing officer, told attendees that travelers who had not yet stayed in one of the company’s hotels knew about Best Western as a brand but were not aware of the broader BWH Hotels portfolio. Dubbing these travelers “Emerging Explorers,” Park said that when they learned about the full portfolio and what it includes, they were more likely to stay at one of the properties and to join a loyalty program.
Recognizing that loyalty programs, in general, are “confusing and extremely complicated,” Park announced that the company’s WorldHotels Rewards and Best Western Rewards programs will be combined. "Instead of having two separate programs, we will have one loyalty experience that benefits all travelers across the spectrum of the BWH portfolio," she told attendees.
Speaking with media after the general session, Park said the BWH team sought out insights from current “loyalists” and consumers at large to determine how the programs could better meet their needs. “The commonality was, ‘We want a [simpler] way to participate in loyalty programs, and if you make it easy for us, we're more likely to join a loyalty program,’” she said. “So therein lies the opportunity. Simple means not having to educate them on two different awards programs and track two different sets of points.”
The "next evolution" of the loyalty program will take shape "over the course of this next year," Park added.
Insurance
Mark Straszynski, senior vice president and chief financial officer, announced that the company has been developing two potential insurance programs—one for property and the other for liability. "We are now very close to launching both programs," he said.
Cuculic said the property program is set to launch on Nov. 1 followed by a captive general liability program.