In a previous post I wrote about how hotel and restaurant brands don’t mean what they used to. To summarize, hotels, restaurants and consumers used to rely on corporate brand identity to predict the quality their visit. In a world of franchisees, franchisors, brand managers, brand bibles, and brand standards, many hospitality companies have long given up the idea of running hotels and restaurants in favor of selling franchises. In my own experience I worked for a hotel chain that had no less than 16 different hotel brands for consumers (and franchisees) to choose from, and that was many years ago before they added a couple.
Hospitality companies have turned into brand-brokers rather than hospitality professionals. Let’s face it, large hospitality companies who pay millions of dollars per month in franchise fees have some clout. Even a hospitality with the most demanding brand standards will bend the rules a bit for their largest clients. What good is a brand if “Brand X Properties” who owns 1/3 of all of “Parent Brand X’s” hotels nationwide can get away with breaking the brand rules and offers a lower level of service? It is for this reason that corporate brand is dead in the world of hotels and restaurants.
Don’t worry – as the corporate brand dies it is replaced by the individual brand. Before the internet, individual hotels and restaurants had very little chance of building a national reputation on their own. There was simply no way that even the best hotel or restaurant could reach out to the masses. Travel agents helped some hotels, but they sold the properties that they wanted to sell. Today, however, tools like TripAdvisor, Yelp, Kayak, Facebook, Twitter and about a thousand other up-and-comers make it possible for individual properties to show the world how great they are.
So hospitalty managers – do a good enough job that people want to talk about your hotel or restaurant, and watch as your individual brand takes shape!
