Dorothy Dowling
In April, Best Western owners approved the "product descriptor program" that will identify North American properties as Best Western (lower midscale), Best Western Plus (middle midscale) and Best Western Premier (upper midscale). To help define the three tiers based on distinguishing characteristics, the company polled 2,400 travelers and interviewed top global corporate clients. Senior vice president of marketing and sales Dorothy Dowling spoke here last month with The Transnationalabout the strategy, Best Western's personalized corporate booking portals and the request for proposal process.
Can you speak about the descriptor strategy and its purpose?
We launch it in February [2011]; this is our soft launch year. We were very engaged with our clients in terms of evolving the descriptor strategy from the onset. It was their expressed needs for many years that really told us that we needed to help them to be able to drive more business to Best Western. They really felt that we needed some level of delineation within Best Western to really help match their end-users with the product. [Travel managers] were part of it right from the beginning. We have subsequently done a corporate advisory board, and they are extremely positive that the descriptor strategy is going to help them adopt Best Western more broadly in their travel programs next year. The adoption to descriptors in the managed space is going to be purpose-driven. Sometimes it's length-of-stay driven and matching their needs on that particular trip. If you are in for three or four nights, your needs might be very different than if you are in for six hours--you are in that hotel to sleep; your experience is so short, you don't take full advantage of what a property may be offering.
Will the descriptor strategy enhance Best Western's appearance in online corporate booking tools?
We understand you make it into a preferred program and the traveler is going to go to those four or five hotel partners and research what their particular needs are, and then book through the self-booking tool. In terms of the descriptor strategy, a lot of it is going to be how long they are going to be in that market, what their needs are. Do I ever think that global distribution systems are going to get to what can be supplied through a dot-com? I don't think so. The systems are legacy systems, so there are some challenges in dealing with them, but I still think the GDSs are here for a long time because they provide other things.
What are some of the challenges in deploying a fully automated request for proposal and rate loading process?
You have the folks on one end of the spectrum who are saying we should get rid of RFPs all together, and then you have the folks that want more custom RFPs. I don't know if there is a single voice yet, and as a supplier we try to track very closely what the buyers' needs are, but that's a challenge. I haven't seen that any of the proprietary suppliers in the RFP distribution end of the system address more than about 40 percent [of our RFPs] and so there is still this manual process. I would welcome it if other brands have figured it out, because we haven't yet. We are sitting and waiting. To go with any of these supply chain solutions doesn't solve the problem--it solves a part of the problem. It's a big-ticket item any way you want to look at it, and it's hard to do. I wish there were standard solutions. With rate loading, it depends on how many different plan codes they have. With dynamic pricing, it's much easier for us to repair the issues and serve the speed of loading requirements. There is always going to be a requirement for static pricing for certain customers. The nature of dynamic pricing changed as a result of [the downturn], and people realized that if you had dynamic pricing you are going to have parity.
There were reports that business travelers had to downgrade their hotel choices during the economic downturn. Are you seeing those business travelers become repeat customers?
We have more RFPs each successive year for our product. We are seeing growth in those requests but also greater adoption in terms of more properties being considered in the RFPs. Yes, the growth trend continues, and it's positive. The trial did bear it out, but we also see that with some of the travel management companies--the solutions around midmarket products are becoming much more mainstream. There is a belief that there is going to be broader adoption because of that price point around $100 [for a daily room rate], which a lot of corporate travel managers are really focused on.
Is there any update on Best Western's hyperlink direct-connection portal servicethat can be created for corporate clients?
We do that on a client-by-client basis on a request. Feedback has been very positive because we try to create a customer application for them that works for whether it actually has a booking capacity or it has more information--we tailor that to the client. We continue to have demand for it, and we are evolving content in it. For accounts that still want to go through the traditional booking channels, we go through that and through their internal portals in terms of providing them with the content. We get a good understanding from them in terms of what their specific needs are in terms of how they can display content. In the leisure space, I would say yes [there is more adoption], but in the corporate space, I would say no.