FlyerTalk Forums - View Single Post - Choice is clueless about business travel
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Old Jan 2, 2017, 12:27 pm
  #13  
sdsearch
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Join Date: Jan 2005
Location: home = LAX
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Originally Posted by Fletch!
I go to the same cities over and over, and over. The rates don't go down! They will go up, but they never go down.
Well, maybe in your cities they don't, or maybe you aren't checking "often enough"?

I go to the same area over and over and over, and I know that some Choice hotels in that area do drop their rates, some day of or day before, some a few days out, some over a week out, and some never. And whether they drop depends of course on load factors (ie, some weeks of the year they never drop, but other weeks they do).

But it's clear to me, looking at the same area over and over again all year, that it's individual hotels making decisions, not Choice overall. Gosh, individual hotels even make decision sometimes about whether to accept Preferred Customer rates (in-high demand periods, a few hotels stop accepting those, while other hotels in the same area never stop accepting them).

So, again, my experience is that hotels make their own pricing decisions independently (or at most by hotel franchise ownership group, not by Choice Hotels headquarters decisions far away).

That's why I don't understand your complain being against Choice headquarters. Perhaps you should find out if many of the Choice hotels in that market are all owned and operated by the same franchise group owner?

Btw, in my area (in southern California) one pattern is that newer hotels with interior corridors command higher prices while older hotels with (mostly) exterior corridors, no matter what brand, have more trouble commanding higher prices. A Comfort Inn & Suites upgraded the property and rebranded to Clarion but unless they count incidentals (which have gone up since breakfast is no longer free) presumably because of outside corridors their room rates have not gone up much at all. An they're in a hotel cluster where all the hotels with interior corridors are higher priced, and all hotels with exterior corridors are lower priced, no matter what the brand.

The one thing that Choice Hotels corporate has done that keeps their prices (at some properties) lower is that they've continued to tolerate exterior corridors, while for example Hilton got rid of most of its exterior corridor Hamptons some years ago. But that's quite indirect, through brand standards. Choice Hotels does influence rates indirectly through brand standards, but some individual hotels can exceed those brand standards, and in that case Choice Hotels had less to do with their rates.

Of course, if you now decide to say that Choice Hotels is clueclass about business travel because they tolerate outside corridors (and because business travelers don't like those), well then that I will have to agree with. (It's just direct control of hotel rates by Choice Hotels that I don't agree with.)

Last edited by sdsearch; Jan 2, 2017 at 12:34 pm
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