Solutions by Industry

Hotel Brand Repositioning: A Case Study

A multi-brand hotelier embarked on repositioning one of its core brands.

  • The company sought to enhance the brand’s preference and financial performance in the marketplace by significantly improving the brand’s offerings and marketing strategies.
  • Working with APT, management quantified the relative contribution of the brand’s locations vs. its key offerings in achieving targeted guest and financial objectives.
  • The company then identified, prioritized, and implemented specific cost-effective actions to enhance the brand’s positioning and performance.
  • The organization expects the repositioning to generate over $25MM in net present value to owners.
The Company

A large international hotel franchisor and operator of a midscale lodging brand

The Challenge

A global hotel company wanted to reposition one of its brands to compete more effectively in the marketplace.  The company saw an opportunity to fill unmet guest needs, achieve more favorable RevPAR, and better position the brand within a specific set of competitors serving its target customer segment.

The company needed to answer three key questions:

  1. Should resources be focused on modifying the brand’s geographic footprint or improving the brand’s offerings and guest satisfaction?
  2. What aspects of the brand’s offerings have created the largest increase in guest preference, hotel revenues, and RevPAR?
  3. What specific actions should be taken to improve the performance of this brand?
The Solution

Management believed that changes to development strategy, site selection, guest offering, brand messaging and marketing, and physical assets were all important factors for increasing the brand’s ROI for franchisees and the company.

The company used APT's solutions to evaluate the extent to which these factors would improve the performance of the brand relative to its targeted competitors.  In particular, APT quantified the degree to which the locations of the existing hotels accounted for the brand’s performance gap relative to its competitors.  Both the hotel locations and the hotel size proved to be important reasons for the gap between the performance of the brand and its competitors.

Once APT isolated the degree to which location characteristics drove RevPAR underperformance, management planned to pilot a series of different brand offerings to significantly re-position the brand. Examples of new offerings included new lobbies and new guest amenities.

The Results

The hotel company is using APT's solutions on an ongoing basis to measure and improve the effectiveness of its new brand offers, as well as to target, measure, and refine a variety of promotion and advertising strategies.

The organization expects the repositioning to generate over $25MM in net present value to owners.