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Accor’s Ibis Budget brand was rated the Most Improved Brand for 2014, according to the latest BDRC British Hotel Guest Survey, with Hilton’s Doubletree and Hampton Inn/Hampton by Hilton brands also making “significant progress”.


Edinburgh’s Hotel Missoni has been renamed the G&V Royal Mile Hotel after owner Rezidor ended its branding deal with Italian fashion house Missoni. The hotel – along with London’s May Fair Hotel – will form part of Rezidor’s new luxury Quorvus Collection brand.


Other travel buyers also agree there


are a number of factors when choosing hotels that are non-price, and branding helps identify these. “One of the key elements of a brand is that it’s fairly clear to us what is on offer, so it often comes down to location and availability for the dates we want,” said a travel manager for a leading mobile phone company, speaking to Buying Business Travel. “But we still want to deal on rates, and that can be satisfied by the volume of busi- ness we can offer a branded hotel group.” Another buyer, from an industrial concern with plants around the UK as well as the continent, suggested loyalty programmes can be more influential with travellers than brands. “I think most of our business travellers do not overly concern themselves with all the brand names, but it can be they want to stay in a particular brand hotel because of the reward points it offers,” he said. “But our default position is to book hotels in our preferred programme.”


STATE OF INDEPENDENTS Independent hotels, which are among the main losers from the growth of brands in Britain, can still have some clout with buyers, suggests Citrix’s Robinson. “There is a tendency for in- dependents to be slightly more flexible when it comes to negotiating corporate deals, although some individual branded properties also have autonomy to do so,” he points out. “While it could be argued that independents can offer better deals through not carrying branding costs, in reality this isn’t always the case, as chains can reduce costs through their volume leverage against many overheads.” Branded chains also have the ad-


vantage of a “better understanding of the corporate market potential”, says Ryan Johnson at FCM. But there are some potential pitfalls with brand-wide corporate deals. “There are limitations to what chain hotels can offer, and we do sometimes come into difficulty when the hotel owner or manager’s plans differ from those of the chain overall for a client rate, which undermine otherwise successful agreements,” Johnson says,


BUYINGBUSINESSTRAVEL.COM BBT NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2014 2 BBT JULY/AUGUST 2014 53


There are a number of factors when choosing hotels that are non-price, and branding helps identify these


adding that in locations with more than one hotel of the same chain, “there are potential conflicts of interest and hotels are restricted in being able to undercut each other, inhibiting competition.” But he feels that independent hotels can sometimes “be more creative, making decisions that suit them and our clients”. Yet there appears to be no stopping


the growth of branded hotels in Britain over the next decade. At present, the leading branded groups account for almost 50 per cent of the 600,000 or so UK room stock, although veteran hotel consultant Melvin Gold believes that “60 per cent of the UK hotel industry will be corporate-branded by 2030”. But don’t be surprised if that happens much, much sooner.


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