Choice CEO Stephen Joyce
If you asked Choice Hotels International CEO Stephen Joyce
about the hotel company he leads, he'd tell you it's just as much a tech firm.
Would a pure hotel company sell its SkyTouch cloud-based property management
system to third parties? Editorial director David Meyer also spoke with Joyce
about Choice's goal to grab corporate travel business.
Travel Procurement:
Why are you sharing your technological achievements with competitors?
Stephen Joyce: When you are [software as a
service]-based, everything is in the cloud and interconnected. It is easier to
do everything, and the cost is dramatically lower. That's why we went into the
business. All of our franchisees [who also work with] other brands kept asking,
"Why can't I use your technology platform with my other X-brand company?"
I said, "Your X-brand company wouldn't like that." We did start
letting some independent hotels buy the system, but then several of the brand
companies started calling, and we said, "This really isn't a proprietary
advantage. Why don't we make it available to everybody?" Our franchisees
and owners benefit because the more people we have on it, the more rapidly we
can do bigger and better things with it. We have several hundred [non-Choice]
hotels at this point and a pipeline of several thousand.
TP: That's a
serious business.
Joyce: Yes it is, but a lot of analysts are still
scratching their heads. It's a little different for a brand company. We are
developing things for our own business, but there is a pretty broad application
for this, so why wouldn't we make it available?
TP: Does it work
for just any franchisee?
Joyce: The
product strategy stretches to 300 rooms and a couple of outlets. When you get
above 300 rooms and lots of outlets, you probably want a different system. But
[the product is suitable for] 80 percent of the hotels in the world.
TP: How
far-reaching is implementation of the system in Choice hotels?
Joyce: Soon we
will be in 35 countries. There are obstacles from German privacy laws and
French tax codes, but we're in Mexico and most of our properties in Australia.
It's going into most of our properties in Europe. We are actually working on
India, and then we'll make it available to our folks in Japan.
TP: You're also
taking the reservation system to the cloud, right?
Joyce: We are rolling out a state-of-the-art
reservations system this year, which is the next generation. It's what everybody
else wants to get to because it is completely non-property based and completely
able to adapt to any other technologies you want to hook it to. The biggest
problem right now is that every time you want to do something like [rolling out
Choice's] virtual card [solution], you have to tap into lots of other systems.
If you are on an old technology, it just means the patch is a lot more
difficult. With this technology that we're bringing to bear, the patch is
really simple because it's built to plug and play from an open source that
draws from many places. We'll be able to do a lot of other things with it
because it is not a hotel reservations system but a product sales organizer.
TP: Just how
important is the business traveler to the growth of Choice?
Joyce: We're the weekend champions. … [The mix] is
two-thirds leisure, one-third business. We see business travel as our big
opportunity. We have had some strong business brands. Comfort Inn in particular
has been strong, and … Sleep Inn also has been getting a lot of business
travel. With the addition of Cambria and Ascend, we're getting a lot of
customers we weren't getting before. The locations where we are putting them,
while they are strong leisure locations, also have the potential for huge
business-demand generation.
TP: Outside the
United States, where are you going to find this corporate-segment market share?
Joyce: Choice has almost no investment in China, but
we have a partner in China that is building 10 or so hotels a year. We are big
in Japan. Europe is our primary target, and it is ripe for flagging for a lot
of the same reasons Ascend worked: We are one of the better converters of
hotels in the business, and that's where we are going to put most of our
energy.