Intercontinental Hotels Group (IHG) is a leading international hotel company serving over 180 million guest each year with over 620,000 rooms in over 4500 hotels spread across nearly 100 countries. Operates such brands as Intercontinental Hotels, Crowne Plaza, Hotel Indigo, Holiday Inn, Holiday Inn Express, Staybridge Suites, and Candlewood Suites.
Challenges
IHG needed to identify the guest experience innovations most meaningful to the guest in order to drive brand loyalty, visit frequency and average daily rate across their global portfolio of hotels.
- Identify brand and product innovations that best support respective target branded guest experiences
- Design innovations and product improvements that support achievement of target IHG and Owner financial ROI
- Coordinate process to ensure functional and Owner support as well as brand consistency across roughly 20 functional groups and 4500 hotels around the world
Approach
Created a global IHG team and utilized management interviews, owner surveys, competitor comparisons, and best practices examples to develop new innovation and product development process called “Brand Ready”.
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Developed cross-functional working team that included brand management, design and construction, operations, human resources, Owners, general managers, legal and others
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Created new, detailed process with cross-functional accountability that included 5 high-level steps and over 200 detailed activities
- Built IHG and Owners economics and ROI calculations into the process to ensure financial success
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Conducted training across brand teams and functional groups
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Worked with brand teams to implement and roll out innovations with refinements to designs along the way
Results
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Identified and managed roughly 30 innovations across 7 IHG brands including InterContinental, Holiday Inn, Crowne Plaza, Hotel Indigo and others
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Identified need to reduce cost of strategic hotel design change from $1.2 million to $500k
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Measured results based on IHG and Owner ROI, overall guest satisfaction, occupancy and average daily rate
