PHOENIX—While other brands loosened standards as the hotel industry spiraled through the downturn, Country Inns & Suites broke from its peers and maintained a hard line.
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Steve Mogck |
“This is a time where you really have to hold your ground,” said Steve Mogck, the brand’s CEO, during a break at last week’s Lodging Conference at the Arizona Biltmore. “Once you begin to let your standards become lax, it’s very challenging to get that horse back in the barn because the consumer will realize that you’ve allowed things to slide.” Loosening standards might seem uncharacteristic of Carlson’s midscale-without-food-and-beverage brand. After all, Country Inns is a chain that espouses above all else the ideals of a “cozy” guest experience, Mogck said.
The franchisor’s stance didn’t ignore the needs of its owners and operators. To do so would ignore its own balance sheet; Carlson owns a handful of the brand’s 500-plus hotels.
“We took a practical viewpoint of what costs we could take out because we needed to be sensitive,” Mogck said.
The company cut amenity spend by 7%, for example, by replacing its private label with products supplied by Pantene. It also switched to new uniforms that not only cost less but looked better, Mogck said.
Guests and griddles
But it’s not just about taking costs out. As they stood on the precipice of the Great Recession, Mogck and Country Inn’s management team thought about areas in need of investment.
“We were looking at core things that we needed to do for our consumers that would make sure the brand stayed relevant and continued to really delight them as they came into the properties,” he said.
At the top of the list was breakfast. After conducting guest surveys and studies, Mogck and his team found an opportunity to make breakfast one of the brand’s key differentiators. The result was the complimentary “be our guest breakfast” campaign, which rolled out this summer.
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The program features a variety of hot and cold breakfast options, including Belgian waffles, rotating hot entrées like sausage, scrambled eggs and biscuits and gravy, as well as healthy fare such as fruit and yogurt. Mogck said early estimates of the program’s up-front cost for each hotel was approximately US$10,000 to US$15,000, but by pushing for aggressive negotiations with national food vendors like Sysco, the value-engineered cost is less than US$5,000.
“There is some additional cost, … but value is a huge deal to the consumer in this environment,” Mogck said. “What we’ve seen is that when we can take breakfast up to that level, the value driver is huge from a consumer standpoint. People will stay at your hotel because of the breakfast and the quality of the breakfast that you can serve.
“It’s an absolute differentiator in this space,” he added.
Buddying up to business
The breakfast campaign couldn’t have come at a better time. When the program rolled out, Country Inns was still experiencing a marked increase in its mix of business travelers who traded down during the recession.
The brand’s management team is hoping its portfolio made an impression on those travelers. (Guest satisfaction scores, which were up during the past year and a half, certainly suggest as much.) Mogck said the company is launching a campaign to retain business travelers as the economy begins to rebound.
“We found for us competitively to go after these full-service hotels that were around us was a great strategy,” he said. “We’re going to keep pushing that this year to make us much more aware for the business traveler.”