Best Western Reaches For The Stars

Best Western International’s recently completed North American convention in beautiful Montréal was a strikingly introspective affair. In his address to the 2,000 or so member owners in attendance, President and CEO David Kong unveiled the results of a study from a third party consultant that concludes Best Western is in serious danger of falling to the bottom of the mid-scale sector unless tougher brand standards and a greater consistency of quality are enacted.

This is not a particularly shocking realization, to be sure. Brands exist as a kind of promise to customers of a relatively standardized experience at any given property; of course, this becomes particularly tricky with a membership organization like Best Western, wherein member hoteliers pride themselves on their properties’ individuality. Standardization and uniqueness are hardly mutually exclusive by necessity, but they are not exactly natural bedfellows, either.

Standardizing such a free-form, diverse assemblage of hotels will require long-term commitment and a lot of tough love, but it can be done. Best Western’s standards review board will consider more than 200 cases this year of properties not up to snuff, more than double the number of hearings it has held in recent years. Kong figures between 5% and 10% of the brand portfolio will require near-term upgrades costing US$5,000 or more per key. Those are certainly good starts.

But new fixtures and uniform cleanliness are but a small piece of the standards puzzle. The linchpin of Kong’s plan to restore Best Western to its historic glory comes in the form of that all-too-frequently overlooked hotel amenity: customer service. Kong is calling for Best Western’s 4,100-plus hotels to deliver service that is as good or even better than that found at Ritz-Carltons or Four Seasons. It’s an audacious goal to be sure, and one couldn’t help but sense plenty of eyes in the crowd rolling when he said it, but he was earnest. “Some say it’s a pipedream,” he said. “I disagree.”

Time will tell whether it’s a pipedream, but even if it is, competing hoteliers ought to take heed. Kong could have very easily set a goal of having the best service in the mid-scale sector, or of having guest satisfaction ratings increase X percent, and the snickers would have been many fewer—but you can’t achieve greatness unless you demand greatness.

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