Interview: Ian Barrigan Of Guoman & Thistle Hotels

London-based Guoman & Thistle Hotels in recent years has boosted its international sales presence, particularly in targeting buyers based in North America. Most of the company's hotels are in the United Kingdom, which is its most critical market, but it regards North American as the second-most critical market for its business, according to global sales director Ian Barrigan. Barrigan recently spoke with BTN lodging editor Michael B. Baker about Guoman & Thistle's sales strategy for the coming year and inroads made with North American buyers.

What's your sales strategy to attract business from North America?

The U.S. sales team has been established for a relatively short period of time, but we now have representation in New York, Washington, Chicago and Los Angeles. We're going to stay at that level of representation at the moment because we are going through a very exciting investment program for our hotels in the U.K. In the U.K., we have 37 hotels, five of which are Guoman, 32 of which are Thistles. In the last three years, we've spent over £100 million investing in the hotel products. We are looking at making sure that important markets to us, especially in the business side, in North America, have the right people speaking to the corporate buyers, making sure first of all they're up to date on what Guoman & Thistle offers to their travelers and making it much easier for the important buyers in North America to do business with us.

Are you replicating that growth in other regions of the world?

At the moment, we have one person looking after Germany, based in Düsseldorf, and we've got somebody for the French and Benelux markets. Essentially, North America's gotten to the point where we're happy with the team. They're stable. We're going to grow Western Europe in the same way, and then come back to America probably in the second quarter of next year and see what the next phase of growth is in terms of what our customers need.

How is the RFP season shaping up this year?

Essentially, there's no real difference in terms of the approach buyers are taking. Last year, a lot of people talked about cautious optimism, which for us meant that the playing field had changed in terms of spend, and everyone was much more cautious about business travel. From last year to this year, it's pretty much the same approach. We're still seeing in RFPs requests for multiyear contracts. We're still seeing requests for free Wi-Fi. All the things we saw last year are still tradables this year. The environment broadly is the same. Last year it was about double-dip recession; this year it's about the Eurozone defaulting. It's broadly the same type of business atmosphere, with our buyers just desperately wanting to make sure they're getting value from us in the same sort of way. The only major difference for us is we have a larger number of RFP programs this year, mainly because we spent a lot of time last year, especially in the U.K., looking at the hotels and the investment program we put into place. A lot of program managers are much happier making sure we're part of the RFPs in the U.K.

What was the focus of your investment program?

In terms of the five Guoman hotels in London, they're all based in fantastic locations. The flagship hotel, the Royal Horseguards in Whitehall, is right on the banks over the River Thames basically; that's a five-star property and the other four hotels are four-star deluxe. Those hotels had about £10 million-plus spent on them, with investment programs of up to £20 million per hotel over the past three years. They're iconic old London buildings. It takes a lot of time and money restoring buildings like that, because they're listed buildings, which means they're of significance, which means you can't just rip things out and put in things you prefer. You have to work with the local authorities. They're not modern buildings. It takes a lot of time, care and money to restore them.

Are you looking to grow your portfolio?

The investment program is certainly ongoing in 2012. It's not just London-focused. We've got great hotels in Liverpool, in Manchester and in Glasgow. Certainly, Guoman and Thistle in my mind are some of the strongest, emergent hotel brands in the U.K., so there's work ongoing at the moment to see what a development program might look like in the U.K. and also internationally. We have two hotels in Malaysia and one in Shanghai, which is a Guoman, so people in the organization are looking at a development pipeline, but we want to make sure that we finish this investment program before we go into that next phase. Parallel to that, there's lots of customer focus groups ongoing, so there are things like loyalty programs, because our clients said that’s important to us, and we haven't gotten that yet. That's being launched in the first quarter of next year.

What impact will the Olympics in London next year have on business travel?

All of the group hotels—we've got about 5,500 rooms in London—are the organizers that make sure that the Olympics have got the right level of commitment in terms of great value accommodation in all the right places. We're going through the process with all the other hotels in terms of what the final numbers look like. We think it's going to be a well-balanced year. We can balance both the Olympic requirements and the business traveler requirements. The final decision on the Olympic requirements is in January, so that's when I'll be able to say whether we've done a good job. The main thing for us is from a very early point to talk to our business clients and make sure we know what they want to do, and for us to plan that and see what we can do.