ATLANTA—InterContinental Hotels Group is embarking on a $200-million investment plan for its upscale Crowne Plaza brand in the Americas.
Franchise owners learned last week about a three-year plan focused on design, operations and service upgrades for the brand.
“We’re trying to cement Crowne Plaza as leading the way in challenging conventional wisdom about how a hotel today meets the needs of the modern business traveler,” said Eric Lent, VP, Americas for Holiday Inn and Crowne Plaza Hotels and Resorts at IHG, in a phone interview Thursday.
Lent said the plan is intended to accelerate the momentum the brand is already building around attracting business travelers.
“What they’re craving is a hotel experience that helps them blend work and relaxation,” he said.
While IHG has not put a specific price tag on these improvements, the company is offering a fee-relief program to owners who sign up when the plan launches in early 2017. Properties that meet certain requirements throughout the process will be eligible to recuperate their investment costs from the company, Lent said.
“Our intent is to drive a rapid deployment of these solutions in as broad a swath of the estate as possible,” he said.
There are 171 Crowne Plaza hotels comprising 45,000 guestrooms open in the Americas, and the company has 13 hotels comprising 2,200 guestrooms in the Americas pipeline.
At the end of the first quarter, Crowne Plaza occupancy in the Americas was 64%, up 1.1% over the first quarter of 2015. Average daily rate was up 2.4% to $118.02, and revenue per available room was up 0.6% to $75.48, according to IHG’s 2016 first-quarter trading update.
Appealing to today’s business traveler
Lent said the underlying goal of the Crowne Plaza brand is “to make business travel work.”
“Think of the spectrum of business (publications),” he said. “There’s Forbes, which is an older business style. Then at the other end of that spectrum is Fast Company. We want to be the Fast Company of business hotels—design-led, culturally relevant, tech-enabled and at the forefront of a new wave of doing business.”
The plan includes marketing and property-level support for owners with training, revenue delivery and sales. Above all, Lent said, the program is built around delivering five of what the company calls guest essentials: connectivity, sleep, service, F&B and delivering a strong first impression.
The first phase of the rollout begins now with updating standards, implementing some technology enhancements, adding a new mattress replacement standard, updating the cleaning approach and PTAC maintenance. The second phase in 2017 will build on the sleep experience, new hotel collateral and new uniforms. The third phase will be a year-long service and F&B training “to evolve how we deliver service in a way that meets expectations of the modern business traveler,” Lent said.
Crowne Plaza also has new guestroom and lobby design solutions that complement the brand’s focus on modern business travelers.
Guestrooms are designed to better facilitate flexibility between work and relaxation, with an upgraded bedding package, more connectivity and flexible work space.
Crowne Plaza's updated guestroom design includes flexible furniture configurations for work and relaxation. (Photo: IHG)
New public space design elements encourage flexible meeting spaces, with options ranging from enclosed pods that seat a small group around a plug-and-play screen for a quick meeting, or communal tables with tablets built in to facilitate easy food and drink orders.
“These solutions are designed to drop into any existing public space,” Lent said. “They’re offerings that allow for flexible meetings—those meetings that happen outside the formal meeting, like when people are prepping for a pitch, working alone or celebrating after a successful meeting.”
Future growth
“The intention of this program is not to kick out hotels,” Lent said. “It’s about helping our hotel owners move up, help them improve their performance where and if they need to, all in an effort to delight the guests.”
It’s all about reaching that critical business traveler demographic, he said.
“We’re calling this an acceleration, not an enhancement,” he said. “The research we’ve done has (shown) that the modern business traveler has evolved, so we want to leverage our heritage but future-proof the business.”