As hotels enjoy a seller's market with seemingly no end in sight, negotiations for 2015 corporate rates proved as difficult as expected for buyers—even for those wielding the most leverage.
Analysts at mega travel management company consultancy groups said corporate hotel rates for 2015 largely fell at the high end of forecast ranges or, in many global regions, above those ranges. Achieving even that was no small feat.
"We went into it expecting it to be a challenging environment, and the timelines were probably as long as I can ever remember them being," said Eric Jongeling, director of hotel solutions in the Americas for Carlson Wagonlit Travel Solutions Group. "There were multiple rounds of negotiation, and it was very tough to keep to the timelines."
BCD Travel's Advito consultancy, meanwhile, reported that corporate negotiated hotel rates are trending higher than forecast in North America, Europe and Africa.
In North America, corporate hotel rate increases are averaging 6 percent to 7 percent year over year, compared with an earlier forecast of 3 percent, Advito hotel practice leader Marwan Batrouni said. Corporate hotel rates in Europe increased 2 percent to 4 percent, up from Advito's earlier forecast of 1 percent to 3 percent. In Africa, travel buyers are seeing rate increases between 7 percent and 9 percent, driven largely from significant demand pickup in South Africa, Batrouni said. Advito's earlier forecast had projected an increase of 2 percent to 4 percent in Africa.
In the Middle East, on the other hand, corporate rates for 2015 have turned out lower than expected, he said. As the region sees demand slow down due to political instability, Advito has seen hotel rates there increase 2 percent to 4 percent year over year, compared with its earlier forecast of 3 percent to 5 percent.
Hotel rate increases have fallen within the forecast range in the Asia/Pacific region (2 percent to 4 percent) and Latin America (5 percent to 7 percent), Batrouni added.
Within the United States, the San Francisco area, which has seen little hotel supply added amid strong demand growth, was one of the most challenging markets for buyers. Speaking at a event in Dallas staged by The BTN Group last year during the height of hotel negotiating season, Linda Bryant, manager of corporate travel services for Essilor of America, said she was seeing double-digit-percentage rate increases in San Francisco and the surrounding areas.
"In San Francisco, Sunnyvale and the Silicon Valley region, if you can get increases below double digits, you're doing good," she said.
Speaking at the same event, KBR global travel director Darcy Taylor said Houston also was a challenging market for negotiations. CWT's Jongeling said the city in years past "had been fairly low in terms of growth, so perhaps this year hotels were trying to catch up."
Other U.S. markets that consultants and buyers said proved a challenge this year included Los Angeles, Phoenix, Seattle and Denver. Globally, challenging markets included such usual suspects as London and Paris as well as Dubai, São Paulo, Melbourne and Mexico City, which Jongeling said had "considerably higher rates, well above the Latin America region [by] itself."
While major clients in past years had been able to keep hotel rates flat or with only slight increases, that was not the case this year, Jongeling said.
For smaller programs, even getting hotels to come to the negotiating table was a challenge. Essilor's Bryant said she was seeing hotels require a higher minimum threshold in order to secure corporate rates.
"We were negotiating with hotels with which we had 50 nights or more, but they aren't playing with us for that; they want 100," said Bryant, whose travel program consists of just under 300 hotels globally. "Because of that, our program size will probably go down in 2015."
Having that sort of flexibility, coupled with demonstrable compliance levels, proved a key in mitigating the worst increases for 2015, Jongeling said.
"A lot of it depended on the ability of clients to shift share, changing properties within programs that had tremendous increases," he said. "Companies that were able to employ that kind of strategy definitely came out better than ones that just stuck with their preferreds."
One long-running strategy for buyers has been trading down, replacing upper-tier properties in a program with lower-tier properties that still have facilities and amenities appropriate for business travelers. While that remained a strategy for buyers this year, negotiating with lower-tier properties for 2015 was not easy either, Jongeling said.
"Upper upscale properties had been leading in terms of rate growth, but midscale and upscale properties really tried to make up for some of that lost growth," he said.
Even so, Batrouni said that trading down "was almost an inevitable strategy to take in some situations because they were so tough to negotiate."
Bryant added that she increasingly was seeing amenities, particularly breakfast, taken out of rates in early negotiations. For the most part, hotels were receptive to putting those back in during later rounds, Batrouni said.
In fact, with rate-inclusive Internet, buyers improved this year. For 2015 programs, about 93 percent of hotels agreed on final preferred rates that included Internet access, compared with 85 percent in 2014 programs, according to CWT's Jongeling.
That follows a general trend in the hotel industry of easing up on Internet surcharges. Hyatt Hotels Corp., for example, beginning this month has made basic Wi-Fi access free across its portfolio. Marriott International and Starwood Hotels also recently changed their Wi-Fi policies, though free access is limited only to loyalty program members who book through the hotels' websites and mobile apps.
Another policy change at two major multibrand hotel companies arose in the middle of the negotiating season. Both Hilton Worldwide and Marriott International in November announced their respective cancellation policies for 2015 would be to charge travelers a one-night's room fee for stays not canceled by the day prior to arrival.
Batrouni said that as the announcement came out mid-negotiations, many buyers already had gotten offers that did not include the more stringent cancellation policies, though buyers should watch closely to see whether other hotel companies change their policies as well. It's part of a larger trend of "a lot of emphasis on yield management by suppliers," he said.
"These give them additional flexibility to manage inventories and yields," Batrouni said. "Others are pushing for more dynamic pricing or chainwide-agreement-type pricing, which also follows suit with overall yield management."
On the dynamic pricing issue, while both Batrouni and Jongeling said that more travel buyers are willing to look at hybrid programs that include dynamically priced and chainwide agreements in addition to negotiated flat rates, only a small percentage of buyers are adopting it on a large scale.
This report originally appeared in the February 2015 edition of Travel Procurement.