Lindsey Ueberroth
Preferred Hotel Group provides sales support, marketing and technology solutions to 650 independent hotels and resorts spread across 75 countries and sorted into five brands: Preferred Hotels & Resorts, Preferred Boutique, Summit Hotels & Resorts, Sterling Hotels and Historic Hotels of America. Acquired four years ago by travel industry veterans John and Gail Ueberroth, the Chicago-based company does not own or manage any of its affiliated properties, but interfaces as a single entity with travel managers and travel agents on behalf of all the hotels. Preferred fields 60 corporate and leisure sales representatives and offers a value-add package across 75 percent of its properties that includes late checkin/checkout options, room upgrades and free Internet access. During the National Business Travel Association conference here in July, executive vice president of brand development Lindsey Ueberroth spoke with Management.travel.
What are the basic requirements for membership, and what does a property get in exchange?
To be a member, they first have to pass a quality of assurance test. We have an outside party go in and do this unannounced so we know each brand has its own assurance. Every year they go in and do that, so they have to maintain the benchmark. They have to be loaded in the global distribution system on the branded chain code. and they have to keep rates open and loaded. From a branding standpoint, there are certain things like having our plaques on the walls, having the directories and magazines in the rooms and having our logo on ads that are running in magazines. We try to engage the hotels. Our regional team is responsible for the retention of the hotels and every brand, and adding new properties in their region. It sends out an incentive for the hotels to be very focused on how we get the right business into our hotels and what we are doing for them. We find that the more a hotel participates with us, the more the hotel benefits. We have 300-plus events, like tradeshows and conferences, where hotels can participate with us as a brand at a fraction of the cost if they were to do it on their own. We are giving them better rates, better pricing and things like that. We are constantly trying to engage the hotel in all the value-adds that we provide.
How did the organization form relationships with corporate travel managers?
Our corporate sales team, which is global, has about 300 managed accounts that we work with, that we are actively calling on and doing that networking with our hotels. Then we have another 250 monitored accounts, which we may not be calling upon as actively, but we are keeping track of them and will include those in the request for proposals process. It is our own internal network that we have created, and we are running through the Lanyon RFP system.
Is there a proprietary nature to the relationships between RFP processors and lodging companies, where the provider may say, "In order to use our system, you have to use our other system?"
It would be great if we could mandate the process of "in order to use our system, you have to use our other system" because that would make it a more seamless process for us to report on our ROI and make it easier on our partner properties, but that is not the case. Lanyon is our preferred vendor and partner and how we process the majority of our RFPs. We have done a great deal of research on the best partner and Lanyon is that for our company, but, at the end of the day, we still have hotels that go out and use other technology or partners because of corporations that mandate use of other systems to process their RFPs. But it certainly makes it easier on us if they are using Lanyon.
How do negotiated rates get loaded?
We have our own in-house reservation and account management team that does that. It's about as manual as it can get. We do all our own rate loading and checking.
In what other ways are the independent properties tied together?
From a group sales side, we have it set up so we can actually exchange rates with each other through a system that we built from scratch. If there is a piece of business that they know isn't going to come back to their property, they can forward that lead out to a sister property within the network. The other way they are tied together is that we have a loyalty program that is consumer-based. It's called our IPrefer global guest benefit program.