Choice Hotels Ships Kitchens to Hotel Rooms

06.12.2023 - 04:13 / skift.com / Srividya Kalyanaraman

Happy hump day, folks! It’s a short week and a skinny newsletter kinda day today. 

Let’s hit it:

If you’re looking to catch up on the ensuing Choice-Wyndham takeover drama, I recommend you get the deets from Daily Lodging Report. But here we’re talking about its extended stay business. 

Did you know that Choice Hotels ships a kitchen in a box to transform your plain Jane hotel room into an extended stay unit? The company already has four extended stay brands — but its focus is sharp on two of them: WoodSpring and Everhome Suites. And it is ready to not take on, but rather collaborate, with private equity and institutional investors looking to enter this space. 

I spoke to Matt McElhare, senior vice president of extended stay and Ron Burgett, senior vice president of franchise development in Choice’s extended stay business. 

Only juicy tidbits here:

Do private equity firms investing in short-term rentals pose a threat to extended stay brands?

Matt McElhare: In a lot of ways that’s validation for the opportunity that exists in extended stay accommodations. And that’s what’s been driving our investment as a company over the last six years — to build a leadership presence in the extended stay branded solution for long staying travelers.

Right now in the hospitality space, this demand accounts for roughly 20% of overall lodging demand, but supply is only roughly about 10%. Majority of travelers seeking longer stays want consistency, convenience and predictability. Those three factors create a competitive advantage for a branded solution relative to a short term rental where it is much more difficult to create that consistency across the board.

Ron Burgett: Most of our brands are playing in the midscale and economy segment. Private equity firms like TPG — that’s a little more for the affluent traveler. Can you imagine the marketing costs to do that, right? But they don’t have the power of Choice Hotels. 

We have 1,000 hotels that we can attract people to kind of take a look at what we have to offer, but that is a very expensive model. It will work, because demand is twice the supply. We’ll let them have that little piece of the demand at the top for now. But rest assured we’re not you know, assuming that they’re not a competitor we’re watching and we want to see what they’re doing. But I think we can learn faster with our background.

Explain the kitchen-in-a-box concept

Ron Burgett: If we’re talking to developers, and then want to get in this business — What’s the quickest way to do it? 

We could go into the transient hotel room and give them what Matt and his team developed, which is called Kitchen in a box. So we literally ship a kitchen for however many rooms they have to that property and give them