Having recently launched an umbrella marketing campaign in North America, Wyndham Hotel Group, which has a complex history of takeovers, splits, mergers and acquisitions, is looking to “leverage the scale” according to senior vice president and managing director EMEA, Rui Barros.
“Up until now the 15 brands have had dedicated marketing spends and they would do their own thing,” he tells Hotelier. “What we’ve found is that we don’t get so much bang for our buck on advertising spend by doing everything separately so we’ve decided to pull all of our brands together.”
Not relying solely on a campaign to do this however, Barros highlights the importance of harnessing team spirit to create momentum — something he refers to as “the butterfly effect”. He explains that prior to the company’s recent North America campaign, the “glue that really held the brands together was the loyalty programme to a large degree”, and this is something Wyndham associates are responsible for driving forward on the ground.
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The Wyndham Rewards loyalty programme was advocated strongly to colleagues by Barros over the course of the company’s recent EMEA Summit 2014, a two-day conference held at the Wyndham Grand Berlin Potsdamer Platz in Germany in June.
Barros urged use of the programme not only as a tool for increasing brand awareness in the market, but as a way of lowering distribution costs and thereby bridging the gap between RevPAR and GopPAR.
“The area I’ve found that is really influencing operators year on year is the cost of distribution,” Barros asserts. “I believe this is one of the areas where both the brand and hotel can partner to drive gross operating profit (GOP).
“We need to be honest with ourselves and look at the mix of business and the cost associated with that. We have a responsibility to do everything we can to shift some of the mix that’s more expensive in terms of distribution costs to something less expensive.”
Driving customers away from intermediaries and towards booking with brand.com can ultimately shift distribution costs, which goes down to the bottom line, he explains.
“If we drive loyalty, this pushes distribution costs down to 5% as opposed to 25%–30%. Hotels are filling the same amount of rooms but with a more valuable guest because the cost goes down,” Barros adds.
With a large focus on franchised properties, Barros is aware that Wyndham Hotel Group does not have much visibility over the variable costs of these businesses, however, he is quick to assert that the one cost the company has most control over is distribution.
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