LOS ANGELES — This year is going to be an important year for BWH Hotels Group, according to President and CEO Larry Cuculic.
As such, Cuculic has challenged his team to evaluate everything they do to see how they can be more efficient and effective to drive more success — and revenue — to BWH's hotels.
“But no stone unturned: sales, marketing, technology, brand management, everyone,” he said in a podcast interview with HNN at the Americas Lodging Investment Summit. “It’s a year I think we need to look forward to how we’ll be successful 10 or 20 years from now because everything seems to be changing so quickly,” he said.
That all plays into the company’s goal of reaching 5,150 hotels at five years, which will require adding about 700 hotels to its system, Cuculic said. That breaks down to about 125 to 150 net growth globally each year.
As the company’s hotel owners see the opportunity to develop a new hotel under a BWH Hotels brand, that’s a great growth engine, he said. Many hotel owners have more than one BWH Hotels property, and the way to develop more is to have success stories with the brand.
The company looks at what hotel developers want in a new project, he said. If they want a midscale or upper-midscale hotel, or they have a hotel and they want to reposition it to better fit the market and achieve a higher average daily rate, they have options. BWH Hotels is the second-leading soft-brand company in the world with 650 hotels through its BW Premier Collection, BW Signature Collection and WorldHotels’ four collections.
BWH Hotels is growing its portfolio through conversions and new construction, Cuculic said. It’s a difficult development environment, and the company has key money opportunities for developers to help with their equity stack as well as reduced fee structures for new construction.
“We'll look at any project, and the appetite we have is to make sure that hotel, that hotelier, decides to affiliate with BWH Hotels and provide that opportunity where they can see that it's a partnership,” he said.
For all of HNN's discussion with Larry Cuculic, listen to the podcast above.