Ramada Intros National Accounts Plan

<B>Ramada Intros National Accounts Plan</B>

By Bruce Serlen

Ramada this week launched its first national accounts program, called Ramada Corporate Select. Featuring 250 highly rated properties in the Ramada portfolio, the initiative is intended to encourage travel managers to include midprice Ramada in their preferred hotel programs for 2001.

"Travel buyers must include all 250 or none," said Steve Grew, corporate director for regional sales, referring to the group of properties as a "chain within a chain." Like any national accounts program, negotiated rates will depend on room night volume projections. There are about 1,000 U.S. Ramada Limited, Inn and Plaza Hotel properties.

A number of the Ramadas are located in such key destinations as New York, San Francisco and New Orleans, where it can be particularly difficult to find available rooms midweek. "We also have a hotel in Sunnyvale, Calif., which is in the middle of Silicon Valley, a market many buyers believe is the tightest in the country," he said.

But Ramada, which is a subsidiary of Cendant Corp., also is well positioned in secondary and tertiary markets. "This could turn out to be the biggest benefit for buyers because they often have trouble getting sufficient coverage in these smaller destinations," Grew said.

Prior to the introduction of Corporate Select, travel managers submitted RFPs to individual properties, "but this was time consuming for buyers interested in a large number of properties," he said. "Plus, consistency could be an issue with it being hard for buyers to know that the hotels solicited were all at the same high level of quality."

For travel buyers, the Ramada endeavor gives them one more option on the national accounts level, which can be welcome. But for buyers whose companies' volumes or travel patterns don't warrant national account status, the question of redundant sales calls arises. "With many hotel chains, you receive sales calls from the national accounts sales team at the same time you're hearing from the people at the local properties with whom you already may have a relationship," said Laurie Belanger, travel manager at Domino's Pizza in Ann Arbor, Mich.

Grew acknowledged that there might be some overlap, but said the value of the program for travel buyers outweighed the concern.

"Besides, the people at the local level do have a prior relationship in place and know the local market conditions first hand, so it makes sense that we work with them," he said.

Since Ramada is strictly a franchise operation, an initiative such as Corporate Select requires owners to pay greater attention to quality issues than they may be used to, if they want their properties to be included. "It's an incentive for them to improve their service and facilities," Grew said.