John Greenleaf
Hilton Worldwide’s DoubleTree, known largely as
a conversion brand in the United States, has been expanding rapidly in global
markets in recent years. BTN lodging
editor Julie Sickel spoke to global brand head John Greenleaf about the brand's
new offerings and future growth. In January, Greenleaf will change
positions to global brand head of Hilton Garden Inn.
How’s development for the brand looking?
Growth has been the biggest story for DoubleTree
for some time. We're a full-service global brand, and we're opening 60 hotels
this year, a pretty remarkable number, and we're able to do that because the
brand is performing well. Most of those openings are outside the United States
rather than inside, and 2014 was the first year that happened. We currently
have 169 hotels in our pipeline, and those are signed deals. About a third are
in the U.S., and the rest of are outside the U.S. There are about 50 in Europe,
the Middle East and Africa and 71 in Asia/Pacific, so that's clearly where the
pipeline is strongest. That’s on top of more than 440 hotels that we currently
have open.
How many of those new deals are conversion
business?
Most is new builds, but the percentage of
conversions varies pretty dramatically by region. If you look at Asia/Pacific,
until we began opening hotels in Australia, New Zealand and Fiji, it was almost
exclusively new builds. Within the U.K., we don't have a single new-build hotel—they're
all conversions—and we have more than 30. Then, in Europe, especially Eastern
and Central Europe, and in Russia, most of the hotels are new builds because
there just aren't acceptable buildings. In the U.S., it's a pretty even split.
We're still building hotels, which most people don't realize because they
consider DoubleTree to be exclusively a conversion brand.
Do you have any concerns about oversupply
hitting the U.S. markets?
That's not an issue. In New York [City], we have
five DoubleTrees open and we're opening a sixth next year; we're calling it
Times Square West. We have nine in the Chicago market, eight in Atlanta, and
there are still areas within those markets available to open hotels. We have
326 hotels in the U.S. right now, but we can easily see that number growing
very rapidly.
What are some of the innovations you’re rolling
out for business and small meetings?
The meeting experience is something that we're always looking to find a way to improve because when you look at hotels and especially technology in hotels, meetings still operate very much the way they have for a very long time. That could either mean they're perfectly fine the way they are, or it could mean that perhaps nobody spent enough time to find a better way to do it. We have a number of different things that we're testing within DoubleTree, and one is the meeting cart. We had carts built by the people who make beverage carts for airlines. We've had the carts customized with drawers that will be used for different purposes. We can have a cookie warmer in one drawer, a chill drawer for beverages, a drawer for snacks, a drawer for office supplies and electronics and a drawer for basically anything else you want. The goal is: If you have a small meeting, you can essentially outfit the cart beforehand and simply wheel it into the meeting room. There's no guarantee that it will work, but the initial feedback we've had has been very positive and we're putting it in 10 hotels to test it. Another we're testing is a convertible meetings space where we've had meeting rooms built out and custom [furniture, fixtures and equipment] built where you can convert the room from a more conventional boardroom to one with soft seating and a work area with a table. You look at people who meet in lobbies or coffee shops or other places. It's really a way to replicate that experience but do it in a more private environment and also provide the amenities you get in a hotel meeting room. We're putting that in two hotels, and we're going to be tracking how well it sells and what people think of it.