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Posted Nov 7, 2011
Las Vegas - Analysts and consultants urged InterContinental Hotels Group owners attending the company's Americas Investors and Leadership Conference here to "trust the data" in pushing up hotel rates and to question conventional wisdom as to the value to the bottom line of online travel agencies.
Posted Sept 27, 2011
Posted Apr 21, 2011
The prototype for Holiday Inn's new "social hub" concept is the latest entry to the obituary page for the midprice hotel's full-service restaurant.
The concept, which Holiday Inn is testing this quarter at its Gwinnett Center property in Atlanta, merges the lobby, bar and restaurant into a single space. The space will still have an on-site chef to prepare fresh food, but the dining choices center more around such grab-and-go breakfast options as sandwiches and specialty coffees and finger-food-style pre- and post-dinner munchies--sliders and chicken fingers, for example--rather than three-course meals.
Posted Dec 16, 2010
Smith Travel Research's announcement that it next year will begin using the terms "midscale" and "upper midscale" to define the midprice tiers is a welcome change, although from a travel buyer's and manager's perspective, the industry's undisputed category-maker could have done more.
Posted Jun 30, 2009
[UPDATE: Mary Ann McNulty conducted a fascinating interview with IHG SVP Stephen Powell on this topic. See it here if you're a subscriber to The Beat. Thanks for Stephen Boggs for helping arrange...]
InterContinental Hotels Group last week issued a press release and then declined to set up a phone interview for one of our reporters to discuss it with an executive. While other companies have done this, they usually don't also do what IHG's press contacts did next, which is to argue with us about why we're not willing to provide questions by email. An "interview" (duh!) is conducted in real time. Yes, reporters may sometimes ask questions by email, but for us that's normally just a matter of fact checking. It's not an interview. All of this makes me wonder what IHG is hiding after a press release (which is not posted to its Web site) indicated that the company is pushing "preferred business accounts" in the Asia-Pacific region to adopt dynamic pricing, which it said provides an "alternative" to annually negotiated rates.
Posted Feb 23, 2009
The likes of Starwood Hotels & Resorts may be going in the other direction, but some of the moderately priced lodging brands are planning to bulk up their sales forces in an attempt to capture market share. Due to current economic woes, some corporate travel managers are cutting costs by downgrading the hotel properties within their programs--although how much depends on who you talk to.
Marriott CFO Arne Sorenson said Marriott did not observe trading down in brand tiers by corporate accounts during the December quarter--as many predicted would happen. He said full-service properties were "able to retain guest loyalty." On the other hand, executives with InterContinental Hotels--owner of budget brands Holiday Inn and Holiday Inn Express--Best Western International, and others are suggesting the recession offers an opportunity.
Posted Aug 12, 2008
InterContinental Hotels Group has what one analyst called a "less negative" outlook on the current and future state of its business in 2008. With heaps of negativity surrounding the lodging industry since May, IHG's second quarter earnings calls left some analysts wondering: Why so positive?
Posted Jun 11, 2008
If taken out of context, this comment made last week by InterContinental Hotels Group Americas vice president of distribution and marketing Dell Ross could have caused heart attacks among investors. But his point, that customers have no loyalty, is increasingly challenging to travel suppliers.
“A couple of years ago I asked our analysts to give me a profile of our Web customers' booking behaviors, and they came back to me a couple of days later and said that they were having a problem: 'We don’t have any customers,' " said Ross. "I said, 'What are you talking about? Of course we have customers.' We are doing 2 billion Web bookings a year, but turns out none of them are ours. Every single customer uses every possible way to book, depending on the circumstance."
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