Several relatively new hotel brands have made strong inroads
with travel buyers in Business Travel
News' 2012 Hotel Chain Survey, with some introduced within the past two
decades beating out legacy brands.
[Please click here to view the digital edition of the 2012 Hotel Chain Survey, featuring all charted
data, downloadable as a pdf.]
BTN this year
changed its scoring system in the hotel chain survey, switching to a six-point
scale from the five-point scale it had used for several years. The criteria
also changed slightly. Non-resort and resort meetings facilities were merged
into a single category, and the rating of commission payment systems was
dropped. One new criterion was added: consistency of a brand's offering.
This makes year-over-year comparisons difficult in terms of
overall buyer satisfaction levels. Comparing surveys does, however, show a
shift in buyers' preferences, with only one brand that was at the top of its
tier in last year's survey repeating that feat this year and several other top
brands from last year falling considerably in their rankings.
Of the multibrand hotel companies, Starwood Hotels &
Resorts Worldwide, Hilton Worldwide and Hyatt Hotels Corp. each had two brands
top their tiers, and Marriott International had one. Hyatt Place, the youngest
of the mostly young select-service category entrants, this year earned its
first number-one finish, as did Starwood's Luxury Collection and St. Regis
brand.
Methodology
Business Travel News'
U.S. Hotel Chain Survey annually measures corporate buyer opinions of the
lodging brands they use. BTN emailed
corporate readers responsible for hotel-buying decisions, asking them to rate
hotels, arranged by tier, with which they did business in the past year.
The survey bases hotel-tier divisions on price-point data
provided by STR along with industry knowledge of how buyers relate with
specific brands. Buyers rated hotels in each segment on as many as 12
attributes, each on an ascending numerical scale from one to six. The highest
average score for each attribute is listed in boldface.
The data is based on 221 respondents. BTN reported results only for hotel tiers and chains with
significant respondent usage.
This report
originally appeared in the Sept. 10, 2012, issue of Business Travel News.