LOS ANGELES — BWH Hotels President and CEO Larry Cuculic loves a story.
In a video interview with Hotel News Now at the 2024 Americas Lodging Investment Summit, Cuculic said that “if you can align something with a story, people will remember it.” He likens the story of BWH Hotels to one of a tree.
“I look at Best Western kind of as this tree that has a tremendously strong root foundation and trunk that builds up,” he said. “Now we have 19 brands — we have boutique, we have luxury, upscale, premium economy — and those are the branches that have now grown out of our strong foundation.”
The Phoenix-based hotel company tends to its foundation by building out its existing brands, such as the WorldHotels portfolio it acquired five years ago. Cuculic said the acquisition added “aspirational brands” to the BWH Hotels portfolio, a major step in fortifying the company’s brand loyalty.
WorldHotels currently has 25 hotels in North America; it only had eight when BWH Hotels acquired it in 2019.
“What’s really important about developing WorldHotels … is that you have to put the right hotel in the right location where you can deliver on what they expect out of coming and joining a WorldHotels brand,” he said. “When you do that, you build a brand that other luxury and upscale hotels want to affiliate with.”
Outlook for 2024
Brad LeBlanc, senior vice president and chief development officer for BWH Hotels, said securing capital is the biggest challenge facing owners, but the hospitality industry on the whole is in better shape than some other real estate segments.
“It’s not just about capital; it’s about lenders coming back to the market finding a healthy marketplace. Hospitality is healthy,” he said. “We see significant growth in [revenue per available room] that’s projected to continue, occupancy growth, [average daily rate] growth, so they’re coming back to a segment that’s healthy, not an office segment that’s sagging, not a multifamily [segment] that’s overbuilt.”
Cuculic said his top business priority of the year is the personalization of travel. That includes utilizing technology to cater travel and experiences to each guest.
“People want to know that you care about them and appreciate them ... from when they begin to shop, till they make the reservation, till they stay and post-stay, they want it to be as personal as possible,” he said. “But at the same time, you have to leverage technology, which sometimes gets in the way of that, [but] that technology allows you to provide the personalized service that you want to use.”
(This story was updated on March 19 to use BWH Hotels' correct company name throughout the article.)