Choice CEO Pat Pacious pens letter to franchisees about Wyndham ambitions

Many of you may have heard about our recent proposal to combine our business with Wyndham.

I’d like to share why I believe this combination makes so much sense for you — and why now is the right time to join Choice and Wyndham. It’s simple: together we can create a company that would significantly improve the value of your business. Here’s how: 

1. We can lower your costs. Running your hotel is becoming more expensive. Wages, interest rates, insurance premiums and taxes are rising — not to mention the costs of attracting guests through third-party channels like Google or OTAs. Together with Wyndham, the combined $1.2 billion of marketing and reservation spend can help reduce your reliance on more expensive customer delivery channels. And we can help reduce your costs by accelerating development of our award-winning technology and maximizing opportunities from AI, cloud computing and mobile. 

2. We can grow your direct revenue. Your hotel would be part of a premier hotel company focused on value-driven leisure and business guests. With up to 160 million members, our rewards program would be on par with the top two players in the industry. Rewards members book direct, pay you higher rates, and return more often than non-members. 

Throughout my 18 years at Choice Hotels, it’s been clear that hotel owners want their brand to continue to bring them more guests and lower their costs. We’ve demonstrated our proven formula for improving hotel profitability by reducing reliance on third-party distribution channels and increasing rewards member guests. In fact, over the past decade, Choice has tripled the number of rewards program members and raised the direct booking contribution to your hotels by 50 per cent.

This isn’t just a promise, it’s a reality as shown through increases in digital direct bookings since our acquisition of Radisson. My leadership team and I enjoyed speaking about this combination with so many of you over the past two weeks and are looking forward to meeting with many more of you directly as we continue our usual fall travels over the next few months. Detailed information on Choice’s proposal for Wyndham is available at Cre​at​e​Val​ue​With​Choice​.com. We appreciate you and your partnership with us as we work to make this combination with Wyndham a reality.