Interview: Choice Hotels COO Patrick Pacious

Choice Hotels International rapidly is expanding its portfolio, with 478 hotels opened worldwide in 2014 and another 603 under construction, approved for development or awaiting conversion as of January 2015. Choice COO and executive vice president Patrick Pacious spoke with BTN lodging editor Julie Sickel about Choice's shift in attention toward corporate travel.

How is Choice reaching out to corporate clients?

We're really transitioning the company to more of a business travel company that corporate travel managers will look to book their clients. If you look at where we're headed in the upscale segment, which is where the largest demand is, we're really focused on our Cambria Hotels & Suites and Ascend Hotel Collection brands, which are most attractive to the business traveler. In Cambria's case, in particular, we're opening hotels in key business traveler locations. This past year, we opened a property next to the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C. We opened one in White Plains, N.Y. We've got two opening in New York City in the next several months, and we just had the grand opening of our Plano, Texas, property.

What aspects of those two brands are aimed at business travelers?

They feature larger lobbies that are really focused on a more social atmosphere and that enable guests to conduct meetings. The other piece is in the guest room itself; it's a larger room, and it feels like an upgrade to consumers who come in and see the product. It has separate living space, separate workspace and separate sleeping space, so if a business traveler wants to do work in the hotel room, the environment is amenable to that. We've paid attention to media hub technology in the Cambria hotel rooms, which gives guests the ability to bring any type of media to life in that space.

Are those the only brands you're gearing toward corporate travel?

We're doing the same thing in our Comfort brand with both Comfort Suites and Comfort Inn. We've significantly rejuvenated that brand over the last couple of years. We did about 300 renovations in 2014 alone. All that work got completed in the fall in time for peak business travel season, and we're starting to see great feedback. A lot of it has to do with design elements, such as recharging stations at the desktop and recharging stations by the bedside; those are key things that our business travelers asked for and that we're delivering on.

What business travel demographic are you going after?

Our Comfort brand is aimed at the midscale to upper-midscale business traveler. Where those hotels are located is really designed to meet that demographic; we have a lot of manufacturers' representatives, transportation industry-type corporate clients, clients who have multiple distribution companies. With 5,300 hotels across the United States, we're a company that can accommodate a nationwide business. Cambria and Ascend are geared more toward that upscale, meeting-frequency business traveler, the individuals who don't travel enough to get to the elite levels of the rewards programs at other hotel companies. We've designed both Cambria itself and our rewards program to make it faster and easier to earn a free night, to earn upgrades, to earn rewards. Our goal is to make it so those rewards can be redeemed for services a business traveler would use at our properties, such as dining services.

What's the breakdown of corporate and leisure business?

We're about two-thirds leisure and one-third business in our domestic portfolio. If you look at Cambria and Ascend, our upscale segment, that corporate piece is much higher. In our international portfolio, it's almost reversed, with about two-thirds business and one-third leisure.

What about group versus transient business?

Of that one-third domestic business piece, about one-third of that is group business and two-thirds is transient. We are seeing group come back in a significant way, and we're putting our Cambria and Ascend hotels in major group travel markets; we expect that business to increase significantly. We've changed our loyalty program to be more amenable to meeting planners, and we've changed our website now to allow much larger groups to book on the website itself.

What are you focused on in the year ahead?

We're really focused on attracting midweek business. It's a real opportunity for us to go after a significant segment that's rebounding. We're seeing the demand at the upscale level exceeding supply, so our goal is to attract that business and drive it to our hotels. We know when consumers come into a Cambria Suites and see it, they're really wowed by the product, and so another focus for us is getting that initial trial from a business traveler.