A difficult negotiating climate has not soured corporate
travel buyers' attitudes toward their hotel chain partners, with satisfaction
scores in Business Travel News' 2014
Hotel Chain Survey up across a vast majority of hotel brands year over year.
Of the 53 hotel brands rated by 368 corporate travel buyer
respondents in the survey, only nine had total scores that were lower than they
were in 2013. Scores were flat at three brands and up across the rest.
[Please click here to
view the digital edition of the 2014 Hotel Chain Survey, featuring all rankings
and downloadable as a pdf.]
Unlike the 2013 Hotel Chain Survey, in which scores
generally were up year over year in the lower tiers but down in the higher
tiers, the 2014 showed improving buyer satisfaction in all tiers. Many of the
highest increases included upper upscale and luxury hotel brands making up for
their drop last year.
At the same time, buyers are facing a challenging hotel
negotiating season, with the average corporate negotiated hotel rate in the
United States for 2015 projected to increase between 5.5 percent and 6.5
percent year over year, according to analysis by Bjorn Hanson, a clinical
professor at New York University's Tisch Center for Hospitality, Tourism and
Sports Management. At the same time, however, hotels this year are investing
more capital back into their properties than ever before, which Hanson suspects
is a key factor among the score increases.
"The hotel industry sought and was granted forgiveness
from travelers for the period when rates were not keeping up with inflation,"
Hanson said. "Consumer expectations increase at the same time, and the
properties are improving at the same time these rates are going up."
It wasn't surprising that many of the highest increases were
among upper upscale and luxury brands, as "most of the spending has been
in those segments," he said.
While buyers this year generally appear more resolved to
accept some level of rate increases than they were in prior years, Hanson added
that there would be a limit to that understanding: "The forecast could be
for some quite dramatic acceleration, which could change the dynamic."
After all, buyer satisfaction with hotel brands also can be
fickle, as demonstrated in this year's survey. For the first time since the
1993 survey, no brand in any tier was a repeat winner from last year's survey.
In fact, three of the nine brands that decreased in total score—Wingate and
Hyatt Place, which were down marginally, and Kimpton, which had the largest
year-over-year drop of any brand—were the top brands in 2013.
Meanwhile, two of the top brands this year—Mandarin Oriental
and Best Western—are well-established brands that achieved the highest scores
in their tiers for the first time in the history of the survey.
Among multibrand hotel companies, Marriott International had
the strongest performance this year, with three of its brands—Marriott,
Courtyard and Residence Inn—earning top scores in their tiers. Janis Milham,
who bears responsibility for two of those brands as Marriott's senior vice
president of modern essentials and extended-stay brands, attributed the
performance to research done across all brands, particularly in examining the
needs of Generation X and Millennial travelers. "In every single one of
our brands, we've launched new renovation plans: new rooms, new designs,
innovative public space, technology," Milham said.
InterContinental Hotels Group was the only other major
multibrand company with a brand that received the top rating in its tier: its
midprice extended-stay Candlewood Suites brand. Hilton Worldwide also fared
well, having the second-highest-rated brand in three tiers and the
third-highest-rated brand in one, as well as above-average total scores for all
but one of its brands.
After reorganizing the survey's tier structure in 2013, BTN made few structural changes this
year. One criterion nominally changed: Buyers rated "public business
amenities" in lieu of "quality of business center" to reflect
the more integrated and social approach many brands now take rather than
walled-off business centers with a few desktop computers and a printer.
This year's survey also moved Starwood's W Hotels brand into
the luxury tier rather than the upper upscale tier, in line with price-point
data reported by hospitality data firm STR Global. All other classifications
were consistent with the 2013 survey.
Methodology
Business Travel News'
Hotel Chain Survey annually measures corporate buyer opinions of the lodging
brands they use. BTN emailed readers
responsible for corporate hotel-buying decisions, asking them to rate hotels,
arranged by tier, with which they have conducted business in the past year.
The survey bases hotel-tier divisions on price-point data
provided by STR Global 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 368 respondents. BTN reported results only for hotel tiers and chains with
significant respondent usage. The average score within each tier also includes scores for brands that lacked
sufficient usage to be included.
This report
originally appeared in the Oct. 13, 2014, edition of Business Travel News.