Choice finds efficiencies to add rooms to upper-midscale brands

NORTH BETHESDA, Maryland — The head of Choice Hotels’ upper-midscale brands said sharpened brand identities and refreshed prototypes for its Comfort and Country Inn & Suites were largely based on knowing who its customers are and inviting them into their living rooms — or in this case — lobbies.

Jenny Aboudou

“That means we’re looking at what customers want… and making sure that we have a product that suits today’s customer as well as the future customer of tomorrow,” Jenny Aboudou, head of upper-midscale brands for Choice Hotels International, told Hotel Investment Today at the Hunter hotel conference. “We’re leaning into a deeper, more nuanced understanding of what value actually means to these customers and what the right ratio of experience and value that they pay for is going to mean.”

Aboudou said for Country Inn & Suites, which was acquired as part of Choice’s Radisson acquisition in 2022, the customer is a “relatively sophisticated, yet laidback traveler… looking to extend the creature comforts of home while they’re on the road,” she said. “These customers love entertaining at home. We’re now welcoming them into essentially our living room (lobby) to make sure that they have that continuity.”

Comfort customers are both “family leisure travelers and road warriors,” Aboudou said.

Country Inn & Suites refreshed lobby

Choice touted the changes as increasing revenue-generating spaces, which will be largely gained by adding rooms to both Country Inn & Suites and Comfort properties by reutilizing space, especially back-of-the-house layouts, without adding to the footprint of either box.

The gains are most striking for Country Inn & Suites properties, where Choice was able to add 18 rooms to a typical 101-room prototype. (The Comfort properties added three rooms to its prototype with the changes.)

“We’ve made sure that we’re incredibly efficient with the back of the house, and we’ve looked at how the building itself is constructed to make sure that we’re reducing tonnage to reduce the amount of structural support required,” Aboudou said.

The changes to the Country Inn & Suites space also meant adjusting meeting space to be a more flexible component of the hotel’s lobby that can either open up as extra lobby space or be closed off to become meeting space.

“We don’t want to lose anything that will impact the guests. So, those front-of-house spaces really need to retain their vibrancy,” said Aboudou. “We need to make sure we’re retaining square footage that aligns with guest expectations. There’s a lot of back-of-house efficiency and nips and tucks that we were able to find within the building.” 

Finding those efficiencies in the Country Inn & Suites prototypes (like combining the mechanical and electrical rooms) will also help save money on development costs, Aboudou said.

“Some of the parts of looking for every little nip and tuck we could find amounted to significant cost savings,” she said. “Obviously, results can vary, but it could end up amounting to 10% to 15% in construction cost reduction for hoteliers.”

Comfort's refreshed lobby

Choice also said the efficiencies can shorten the timeframe to open a hotel (an estimated 30% reduction of stock-keeping units for FF&E for Comfort and lower FF&E implementation costs for Country Inn & Suites). Later this year, it will also be rolling out F&B changes with its breakfast options for both brands (Choice already implemented its Rise & Shine prototype for Comfort in 2023, and Aboudou said these changes will “enhance” those changes.)

These changes will be rolled out in the coming years and also implemented in any new hotels for brands.

Choice said its Country Inn & Suites achieved a 19-point increase in its RevPAR index, a 20% increase in direct online contribution and an increase in revenue from group and business travelers year-over-year.

There are currently nearly 430 Country Inn & Suites hotels open, with 38 added to the pipeline in the last two years. There are currently more than 2,100 Comfort hotels (through its Comfort Inn, Comfort Inn & Suites and Comfort Suites brands) with 122 in the pipeline.