Skift Take
What's driving the recent wave of new hotel brands? Does the industry suffer from brand bloat? Here are some answers.
Early Check-In
Editor’s Note: Skift Senior Hospitality Editor Sean O’Neill brings readers exclusive reporting and insights into hotel deals and development, and how those trends are making an impact across the travel industry.
Hotel companies have been launching new brands again. Hilton Worldwide said on Wednesday it had created its first hotel brand in the economy segment, Spark by Hilton. Accor, the owner of the world’s most hotel brands, said last week it had reorganized itself around its brands. Marriott International, Wyndham Worldwide, Hyatt, Kerzner, and Best Western have created or bought hotel brands in the past several months.
The flurry of activity raises some big-picture questions, such as what drives the creation of hotel brands — and whether there are too many.
To find answers, I spoke with Chekitan Dev, who literally wrote the book on Hospitality Branding. Dev, a distinguished professor at Cornell University's Nolan School of Hotel Administration in the SC Johnson College of Business, is an internationally renowned expert who has testified in numerous hospitality-related lawsuits including multiple cases involving hotel owner–brand relationships. What follows are my questions and his answers, edited for brevity.
Are there more brands than there used to be?
Thirty years ago, there were a few dozen hotel brands. Now there are more than 1,000, as covered by Smith Travel Research (STR). Managing brands profitably has become the central organizing principle of most hospitality organizations, guiding every decision and action.
How should we think about brand proliferation?
A good way to think about brand proliferation is to calculate the ratio of brands to hotel rooms, something I refer to as a "brand coverage ratio."
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