Best Western Taps Lodging Vet Dowling To Head Sales

Best Western International last month expanded senior vice president of marketing Dorothy Dowling's responsibilities to include oversight of sales. Dowling joined Best Western in October and also holds responsibility for field and electronic marketing and its frequency program.

"Best Western has been a solid player in the midmarket sector through the downturn, but even as the economy rebounds, travel managers and especially corporate procurement departments have become much more focused on the value they receive for their money," Dowling said. "For the midmarket, Best Western is well-positioned from both a value and distribution point of view."

With the shift in travel management to a procurement mindset has come a bottom-line, dollars-and-cents orientation, she said.

"The rate structure as well as the service standards we've introduced in the past few years serve us well from a procurement perspective," said Dowling, who joined Best Western from Aramark Corp., where she was involved in the company's lodging portfolio. Prior to that, she held various marketing positions for the Cendant Hotels Group.

In their requests for proposals, travel managers and procurement officers increasingly spell out the services they expect the hotels they use to provide, Dowling said.

"RFPs have gotten very specific as to the features accounts are looking for," Dowling said. "We believe in a single pricing strategy that covers all the amenities business travelers are looking for, including complimentary high-speed Internet access. Procurement officers are pleased when everything is built into the fixed rate."

As an ownership association comprised of more than 4,400 hotels, as opposed to a traditional hotel chain, Best Western has had challenges in ensuring that brand standards were consistently applied across the system. This is especially true for the 2,000 hotels located outside the United States. Global standards introduced in 2003 include 14 core services and amenities, known as Best Requests, that all hotels are required to provide. Two additional items are applicable to U.S. hotels.

"We have both a commitment to these standards and an active quality assurance program," Dowling said. "As they conduct their inspections, QA teams continually are evaluating the hotels to make sure the standards are being enforced."