Growth Under Pressure: The Decisions Hotel Brands Are Making Now

So far, we've covered a lot of strategies that the hotel industry can use to pursue growth.

New hotel conversions, we just talked about loyalty, AI.

Nobody can do all of these things, right? I want to ask you both about limits.

Heather, what is something that IHG was investing in maybe two years ago that you pulled back on? And conversely, what's something that's getting more of your attention now?

Yeah, I mean, I would frame it less about like pulling back, but more just how our platforms are being built and continuing to evolve.

So, for example, at IHG, the last, you know, seven, eight years, we've been investing in a massive technology replatforming, starting with our GRS.

But then quickly moving to replatforming our loyalty program, customer relationship management.

We're in the midst of rolling out a next-gen cloud-based PMS.

We've moved all of our data to the cloud and structured that data so that it can help us leverage AI more efficiently.

So we're now pivoting from investing in those platforms to activating those platforms.

So whether that's an AI-enabled revenue management system, how we're marketing differently, how we are displaying our hotel's content very differently in a much more sophisticated way, it's about how we commercialize those investments in this new environment.

It's kind of stitching together the tech stack that's always been there.

And that's actually a great segue for you, Peter.

I would love to ask you, working with a lot of hotel companies, they're all running these big multi-year efforts, whether it's upgrading CRS systems, launching new brands, loyalty program overhauls.

How many of these can you do before the execution starts to suffer? How do you prioritize these?

Yeah, they're all really important initiatives.

And so I think I will give you an answer.

The number is maybe the less important part, but I think the answer is something like two.

Because it has to do with the individuals to whom the change is being affected.

So if I have a loyalty program relaunch, plus a new reservation system, plus new branding or content management or content service systems, All of those changes might be delivered within the organization, within headquarters, but they all rest on that same general manager on property.

And so we like to think about it in terms of the number of changes that you impart on an individual in a given year.

And that's where the two number comes from because how many times can you ask somebody to change their job or adjust what they're doing within a given year? I think the answer is about two.

But what's more important is what Heather described also around making sure that the initiatives are done in a real high quality way, that they're delivered flawlessly.

Because the last I checked, IT organizations within suppliers, they're running day jobs too.

There's four run the business initiatives that are also stretched and strained in many ways.