Choice Hotels International is relaunching the Park Inn brand it obtained the rights to through its 2022 acquisition of Radisson Hotel Group Americas as a "premium value" brand situated between the midscale and economy tiers, the company announced. Meanwhile, Choice's CEO told reporters the company still is looking at further merger and acquisition possibilities, less than two months after it abandoned its quest to acquire Wyndham Hotels & Resorts.
"There continue to be gaps in our portfolio where we will look to add," Choice president and CEO Patrick Pacious told reporters this week during the company's annual convention of franchisees. "We don't play today in the upscale extended-stay segment. Given the success we have with the four brands in midscale and economy, that's a real opportunity for us."
Pacious noted that about half of Choice's current 22 brands have been brought into the company via acquisition.
"M&A has always been a part of Choice's history. We're in an industry now where scale matters," he said, noting the growth of AI in hotel operations and planning. "AI is based on large language models, and the first word in that is 'large.' The more customer data you have, the more ability you will have to serve customers and see those insights."
The company will use Park Inn by Radisson to fill a particular gap, officials said. "We see a huge opportunity for us here for hotels that straddle the midscale and economy segment but don't fall into the economy and budget segment," said chief development officer David Pepper.
Meanwhile, Pacious said Choice has "a key focus on the group segment to fill the meeting space that we now have in the Radisson brand and the Cambria brand," adding that business travel "is building back. It's one of the last two elements that have not returned full-strength, with the other international inbound."
Group travel largely has returned to pre-pandemic levels, with some exceptions, Pacious said. Remote conferencing still is "impacting that middle tier of business," he said. "The small groups are still traveling, they're still doing big conventions, but it's that 1,500 to 2,000 [attendee] type meeting—it might be a company's regional meeting, it might be in a secondary city—those are the ones that haven't come back yet."