How owners view brands

Viability director Guy Wilkinson says that no matter how analytical an owner is, ultimately choosing a hotel brand will depend on past experience, business sense and simple gut instinct

One part of my job is to advise Middle East hotel owners and developers about which chains and brands they should consider for the management of their properties. At our firm, we present our clients with a fairly detailed profile of the different facets of each chain.

This includes considerations like who owns the chain, how many years it’s been operating, how many hotels and rooms it has around the globe and in this region (including their future pipelines), what brands it offers and how they might fit with the client’s vision for his own hotel, what sales and marketing systems it has, etc.

We encourage our clients to meet with their preferred shortlist of operators, view their PowerPoint presentations, hear their claims and read their brochures, before making a final decision as to the one chain they really like.

We try to be as coldly analytical as possible, and yet the whole process by its very nature remains highly subjective. Even issues that look clear-cut and black and white are in fact subjective. For example, many owners derive their main impressions of one chain or another — positive or negative — from having stayed in one particular hotel.

The fact that an operator manages one beautiful ‘trophy’ property is no guarantee that any other hotels in the chain will be as nice. Vice versa, the fact that one hotel is in desperate need of refurbishment should not tarnish the entire chain, especially as it is probably due to an owner who is reluctant to pay for the renovation, and not an operator decision.

In reality, hotels in our region are really showcases for their owners’ visions, not their operators’. Sure, the operator will be invited in at a typically late stage in the development of a hotel to provide interior design and fit-out standards, but the basic project is typically formulated without the operator’s input.

Therefore, to point to a particular hotel and say it is an outstanding example of one particular brand’s attributes may ever only be partially true — and more often than not, somewhat misleading.

Article continues on next page...

Brand essence
Brands in themselves are in essence a collection of emotional associations that are manipulated by companies to encourage customers to purchase goods or services.

The comparative value of one watch, car or perfume compared to another may have something to do with quality, but is much more related to the hype associated with a brand and how much we ‘buy’ into it. The same is basically true of hotel brands.

To put it another way: regardless of the brand, the price level, or any technical or operational standards associated with it, at the end of the day, the guest experience depends primarily on the true quality of the service, and that in turn depends on individual human beings delivering real guest satisfaction.

The possibility or probability of this happening is largely independent of the names and manufactured emotional associations of the brands.

It’s not that I am knocking hotel brands. The art and science of hotel branding has reached impressive levels of sophistication and is arguably the most important factor in the success of all branded properties — more so than the three L’s (location, location, location) and even to the extent that a disappointing guest experience may still fail to break a guest’s faith in the brand promise.

What I am saying is that the use of brands as a convenient single label for certain types of hotel, naturally encourages us to assume we know at a glance what we are dealing with, even though in reality it hides a complex matrix of product or service traits that may be extremely difficult to reproduce in its entirety across a geographically widespread brand stable.

This brings me back to my original premise, that the operator or brand selection process is highly subjective.

Even dissecting brands into their component parts as we consultants do, brings us only a little closer to having a solid basis for choosing one chain or brand over another.

Owners must take all these factors into account and at the end of the day, rely on that often remarkably sound indicator, business or simple gut instinct.