Several multibrand hotel companies are growing their upscale and luxury boutique collections with an increasingly global eye, a strategy they say is funneling more of those hotels into corporate programs.
In the first year of its Autograph Collection, announced in 2009, Marriott International added more than a dozen boutique, independent hotels and aims to have 40 signed contracts by year-end, said Kip Vreeland, Marriott’s vice president in charge of the collection. Marriott’s initial focus was on hotels in the United States and Canada, but in May it added to the collection its first four hotels in Europe. It intended to expand the portfolio to other regions.
“We’ve gone into South America and Central America and met with a number of owners around there,” Vreeland said. “Asia will be coming at the end of this year.”
Choice Hotels International, which in October 2008 launched its Ascend Collection of upscale boutique hotels, also has global aspirations, according to brand vice president Stacy Ragland. The Ascend Collection now comprises 61 properties in the United States, Canada and the Caribbean. Ragland said Choice is exploring Latin America and further global growth is not out of the question.
Other collections already have a global footprint. Accor launched MGallery a few months prior to Ascend Collection’s debut, and it now includes 35 hotels across five continents, including its first property in London, added this year. Accor plans for the collection to reach 100 properties by 2015. Starwood’s Luxury Collection, launched back in 1995, counts more than 80 hotels across six continents.
Brand leaders noted increasing use of these collections’ properties within corporate programs. Once properties become part of the Autograph Collection, for example, their business traveler ratios generally increase from about one in 10 guests to about one in three, Vreeland said. “If one independent hotel wants to go in and meet with the company, that company is going to be really careful about their time,” he added. “When they’re a part of Marriott, we can load rates into our system and right off the bat expose them to these companies through our sales engines.”
For buyers, the collections present an alternative to somewhat cookie-cutter rooms in line with rigid brand standards. While Marriott monitors Autograph Collection properties through guest satisfaction surveys and occasional site checks, the properties do not have to conform to specific brand standards and are identified as Marriott properties only by an exterior plaque and, for 90 days after they join, a welcome letter inside guest rooms, Vreeland said.
“These hotels have to stand on their own,” he said.
Ascend Collection has created a whole new market for Choice’s corporate buyers, Ragland said. Although Choice during the past few years has expanded its upscale Cambria Suites brand, the vast majority of its properties are in the midprice and economy segment.
“Corporate buyers are extremely thrilled, as we have something else to offer them,” Ragland said. “Obviously, this helps the properties, too, letting them reach customers they’ve never reached.”
Naturally, boutique collections are much easier for hotel companies to build than their own boutique brands. Starwood often is credited with pioneering the boutique brand in the late 1990s by launching W, which now has more than 40 properties, but others have had difficulties. Marriott in 2007 launched its own lifestyle brand, Edition, in partnership with famed boutique hotelier Ian Schrager. The company now is facing a lawsuit from the first Edition-branded hotel, a property in Honolulu that accused Marriott of failing to rapidly develop the brand in line with earlier projections.
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