Cendant Reveals Hotel Strategy

Cendant Corp. late last month unveiled growth strategies for the hotel brands under its new hospitality company, Wyndham Worldwide, which included accelerating room growth rates and expanding customer loyalty programs.

Wyndham Worldwide's 10 brands, including Wyndham Hotels & Resorts, Ramada, Days Inn and Super 8, are positioned in the upscale, midprice and economy tiers. For brands in the midprice and upscale tiers, Wyndham Worldwide plans to increase domestic presence by leveraging property management services to attract developers. It will complement the Wingate Inn product with Wyndham brand recognition and reposition its Ramada brand to enhance service, value and quality.

In the economy sector, Wyndham Worldwide's aim is to continue to grow brands faster than the competitive set. It plans to do so by maximizing growth opportunities while optimizing revenue per available room performance and by growing its TripRewards loyalty program.

Another strategy that Wyndham Worldwide plans to employ is to expand the international presence of its core brands Wyndham, Ramada, Days Inn, Super 8 and Howard Johnson. The company's strategic objective is to grow the system to 700,000 rooms from 532,000 by 2010. Sixty percent of this growth would take place internationally, 35 percent in the domestic upscale and midprice tier, and 5 percent in the economy sector.

Wyndham Worldwide projects that the implementation of these strategies would create sustainable revenue for the company that would increase annually for at least the next three years.