I've been obsessed with travel since I was young, and so far, I've ticked off more than 40 countries on my bucket list. Before I leave for a trip, I usually research the destination beforehand and put together a rough idea of the key sites I don't want to miss.
BWH Hotels CEO Strategy: The Best Western You Don't Know
14.10.2024 - 15:57 / skift.com / Sean Oneill
At the Lodging Conference in Scottsdale, Arizona, Larry Cuculic, the CEO of BWH Hotels, leaned forward, his West Point-honed posture softening as he warmed to his subject.
“We’re not just a mid-scale brand,” he said. “We now have a brand for every guest, a brand for every developer.”
The man helming Best Western’s parent company is eager to make this point. Cuculic said that BWH Hotels has 18 brands, ranging from premium economy SureStay to lifestyle brand Aiden, luxury soft brand WorldHotels Collection, and even branded residences.
The group has 4,300 hotels in 100 countries. Last year, its global reservation enterprise produced $8.2 billion in revenue, a 5.6% increase from 2022.
What truly sets BWH Hotels apart is its business model. Unlike publicly traded behemoths like Choice, Wyndham, and Hilton, Phoenix-based group operates as a non-profit membership organization. It’s like a particularly ambitious co-op board, with hotel owners as voting members.
In 2019, its members voted against going public. They preferred a structure that avoids public shareholder demands.
“We don’t have equity partners that take funds away from our bottom line,” Cuculic explains. “We’re purely hotelier-centric. We have a lower fee structure in most cases.”
The public hotel groups have shareholders demanding growth in net room count. In Cuculic’s telling, desperation for growth at all costs leads them to “stack” hotels — saturating markets with competing hotels within their brand families.
“One of our strengths is our member market area protections, which is very different from every other group,” Cuculic said.
While other hotel giants might gleefully plop down a new property across the street from an existing one, BWH offers its members “territorial protections.” It commissions independent impact studies before allowing new BWH brand hotels to open nearby.
BWH Hotels’ approach to brand standards is another competitive advantage, the company said.
While some hotel chains dictate everything down to the shade of beige on the walls, BWH Group takes a more laissez-faire approach.
“We’re not prescriptive to say, ‘Well, that needs to be blond furniture with blue fabric,'” said Ron Pohl, president, international operations and WorldHotels, BWH Hotels.
Cuculic inherited a company where quality control had become important again after complacency a couple of decades ago.
Previous CEO David Kong ran a quality assurance initiative between 2006 and 2008 that saw the group part ways with many owners and reduce its portfolio size by roughly 40%.
The group has had growth spurts. Since 2018, its portfolio size has expanded 19% to 4,300 hotels.
Net room growth was flat in 2023, but the group experienced “tremendous growth in 2024, with
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