Skift Global Forum East Video: Expanding the Reach of Today’s Independent Hotel Brands

This sponsored content was created in collaboration with a Skift partner.

In this video:

• Global Hotel Alliance’s data-sharing strategy: How do you get more than 40 brands and more than 800 hotels to collaborate instead of compete with each other? By bringing like-minded asset owners together to share customer data and allowing each brand to reach more prospective customers with an alliance-wide content and communication strategy.
• Understanding “the biggest loyalty program nobody’s heard of”: With more than 23 million members, the company’s loyalty program has a key point of differentiation versus other programs that just about everyone knows: There are no points. Instead, the alliance uses a currency system that leverages a fin-tech future and allows hotels to receive 95 cents on the dollar for reward stays.
• Looking at the future in Japan: The company conducts extensive research among its loyalty members, and the data from its latest trend report shows that just about every leisure traveler wants to go to Japan. Part of that may be due to the work that the country completed pre-pandemic to prepare for the Olympics, and another reason may be due to the extended timeframe to lift pandemic restrictions in Asia.

Capella, Kempinski, Leela and Patina — these may not sound like household names to the average traveler, but these independent hotel brands are among a broad range of properties that make up the Global Hotel Alliance. This collective of small brands is adding up to big business, too: More than $2 billion in revenue and more than six million room nights every year. Founded in 2004 as airlines were selling off hotel groups, the alliance has emerged as a leader in preserving the independent spirit of hotels with a new business model for a tech-driven world.

In this video from Skift Global Forum East 2022, we hear from Chris Hartley, CEO of Global Hotel Alliance, in conversation with Carolyn Kremins, president of Skift, about the company’s strategy to compete with the massive marketing and sponsorship budgets of big brands and behemoth online travel agencies. With a shared technology platform, all hotels get the benefits of the alliance’s aim to reduce costs, shift bookings away from expensive third-party channels, create a new approach to loyalty, and drive cross-brand revenue.

This content was created collaboratively by Global Hotel Alliance and Skift’s branded content studio, SkiftX.