Oakwood Sales Director Holt Talks Serviced Apartment Growth, Customer Experience

In the wake of a 2014 joint-venture deal with Singapore-based real estate developer Mapletree Group that was designed to facilitate aggressive global expansion, serviced apartment provider Oakwood Worldwide is widening its network in Canada, Latin America, the Asia/Pacific region and the United States. The company also is three years into an eight-year preferred-provider agreement with Marriott International. Oakwood director of sales David Holt spoke to BTN lodging editor Julie Sickel about the company's evolution and its plan for the future.

Who are your key customers?

Our client base is always evolving. We used to think 10 years ago that we had it locked down: It was travel, insurance, government, entertainment and relocation. Those were our clients and that was it. Now, we still work a lot with financial and energy and government, [and] technology for obvious reasons is an increasing growth vertical for us. Competition for talent has led to heavy thought and investment in the intern experience and that has really grown that vertical for us.

The other big growth is certainly travel. We won a global book of business about 18 months ago from a very large tech company, and their main goal was to reduce costs and provide a better experience to their travelers, and we could facilitate that. Our conversion ratio of short-term stays is the same as long-term. It's really almost perfectly evenly divided into thirds between five-to-11-day business, 12-to-29-day business and 30-day-plus business. We're executing and fulfilling in equal ways on all three lengths of stay, which provides a great amount of savings for the corporate customer.

Do you follow the typical lodging sourcing season, or do you work more with mid-year contracts?

It's both. Now that we have a deeper partnership with travel business units, they are fully engaged and their annual [request-for-proposals] process seems to be about 10 months of the year, and as soon as they finish, they start again. That's new for us. Typically we do go out to RFP. Our contracts are sometimes a year, but mostly three years, and there's some kicker for rates on an annual basis. We certainly have the technology and the expertise and the supply chain to be able to play in that arena. But companies can, and do, come to us midseason, and our distinctive advantage is we don't have fixed inventory. The depth of our supply chain is flexible and fluid and it's based on the insight that we learn from our customers. If a customer comes to us and says we've got something big going in Argentina in a few months, or London or Singapore or St. Louis, we can galvanize our resources.

I imagine your partnership with Marriott is part of that?

With so much evolution happening out on the market, it's been great to connect both our teams together and work both globally and regionally in-market to help customers with seamless offering of both the Marriott portfolio and our apartments. We're the only provider outside of Marriott who's able to reward [Marriott] points for long-term stays in the U.S. domestically. They're one of the top websites visited in the world, so to be included in their depth of media presence and messaging to their travel audience, especially now that travel and mobility are being more blended; it's kind of the right partnership at the right time.

Looking ahead, what is Oakwood’s main focus?

I think the story in the next year will be, how do we support the experience of our clients and their travelers as they accelerate their sharing of services and consolidate travel and mobility programs? We think it’s all about customization. We’ll do whatever our clients’ travelers need, whether it's groceries at the apartment or a meet and greet at the airport. We're partnering with a lot of food delivery organizations like Blue Apron and The Purple Carrot and Plated. Those are opportunities to allow us to set up travelers with an effortless experience where they can focus on work. And it’s not just what's in the apartment itself, but the processes we offer, like duty of care. We're evolving based on the degree our clients are evolving, and they're really managing through a great amount of change.