At a panel appearance at the recent NYU International Hospitality Industry Investment Conference, Wyndham Hotels & Resorts President/CEO Geoff Ballotti said, “We’re not buying brands or real estate, we’re investing in tech.”
In the last several years, Wyndham has invested millions of dollars to benefit both its guests and its franchisees. Hotel Business spoke with company executives to find out about what it has invested in and some of the new programs it is rolling out.
“We’ve been on a multiyear journey here,” said Scott Strickland, EVP/chief information officer (CIO), Wyndham Hotels & Resorts, who joined the company in 2017. “As we look at what it means to be a franchise organization, we said, ‘OK, fast forward to 2025.’ We believe that technology is going to be a differentiator.”
Scott Strickland Wyndham Hotels & Resorts
As a franchisor, he said that offering the latest technology is a value proposition for Wyndham’s owners. “We have a brand,” he said. “We have marketing, which is going to include loyalty, and we have technology…[which is]a fundamental part of this. If you look over the last 2.5 to three years, we’ve invested more than $100 million in technology.”
The company has traditionally grown through acquisition—which has led to a variety of different technology platforms across the company’s thousands of hotels. “Every 18 months or so, Wyndham buys somebody,” said Strickland. “When you buy somebody, you inherit the systems. And so, six years ago, when you looked across our landscape, we had roughly 12 different property management systems (PMS) we were running in North America. We were running four central reservation systems. We were on multiple digital platforms. We didn’t have a CRM. So, all of that is a function of just growing through acquisition. And, we decided, ‘OK, we need to consolidate.’”
Instead of doing that consolidation themselves, the company chose to outsource the technology to experts in their respective fields. “[We choose] the right contracts and establish the right value proposition for both the guests and the franchisee,” he said.
Wyndham was the first and, according to Strickland, still is the only big chain that is on a single central reservation system—from Sabre—that is commercially available. “One of our competitors has one, but they built and maintain it themselves,” he said.
The company also narrowed its multiple PMS platforms to just two. “The reason we chose two is because different hotels have different needs,” he said. “If you think of a Wyndham Grand, they have different needs from a PMS because maybe they are running food and beverage, catering services, spa, golf and those sorts of things. [For that kind of property], we chose Opera.”
The CIO continued, “For a property like a Days Inn with 80 rooms on the side of the road in Nebraska, it doesn’t need any of that. It needs check-in and check-out to be simple for its front-desk agents. We chose one of Sabre’s PMS that interfaced well into [the hotel’s]central reservation system.”
The company also made the move to one digital platform. “It allows us to implement faster and operate more efficiently,” he said. “If you log on to our website here or in Europe or Japan, it’s going to look and feel the same, with some language translations, of course. What is really cool is that we are running all 23 of our brands on that digital website. We’ve created it so we can be really sexy for the Registry Collection and our all-inclusive business, but it can also represent everything that you need to see on the Days Inn level.”
In June, the company also began the rollout of RevIQ, a cloud-based, mobile-first revenue management system (RMS), created in collaboration with IDeaS, which was designed to help franchisees further optimize their revenue strategies and grow market share.
All of these standard platforms are cloud-based in partnerships with Amazon Web Services, Google and Oracle. “We do not have data centers,” said Josh Dow, VP, hotel technology strategy & services, Wyndham. “We don’t power servers.”
As a technologist, Strickland said he was excited about being on the cloud, but the application means so much more for franchisees and guests. “For the franchisees, it means that they don’t have to maintain a server under their front desk,” he said. “It means that if we need to push out an update, we can do that at scale immediately. It allows us to be more flexible, and it allows the franchisee not to worry about technology.”
Strickland believes that being able to push out new updates through the two PMS interfaces is a major advantage for the company, compared to its competitors, which have multiple. “[If they have 12,] it means you have to look at that many interface points,” he said. “From a technology standpoint, it’s just more complicated.”
That ability to push new technology quickly allowed Wyndham to enable its franchisees to add contactless payments during the pandemic with a relatively quick rollout. “We heard from some of our franchisees that they wanted to do this,” said Strickland. “We are standardized on one system—in a week, we started pushing this update out to everybody… There is a real tangible financial benefit, and there’s a cool factor.”
Being on the cloud also takes a lot of responsibility off the franchisees’ shoulders, especially given news in recent years of data breaches across various industries, including hospitality. “If you take a look at some of our hotels five or six years ago, they were running the servers,” he said. “They were responsible for patching and security, and that is no longer a consideration because it’s cloud-based now.”
Dow added, “When you have to protect 10,000 servers under 10,000 desks in the back offices of hotels, it is much more difficult than a big central infrastructure in a couple of clouds.”
New technology launches
All of the changes to Wyndham’s core technologies were about creating a strong foundation for the company to work with its franchisees to roll out enhancements to help both them and guests.
“We built all of these platforms that are cloud-based,” said Strickland. “COVID occurred and we had consumerization of IT—and things changed. We recognized that we wanted to invest now at the property level because that is where the guests and the franchisees had different expectations than we had seen before.”
Strickland and his department worked with outside consultants and franchisees to come up with some initiatives they could bring to properties. They came up with 82.
“We sat down with our franchisee councils, and we looked for those intersections and jointly prioritized what that would look like,” he said.
They narrowed the list of initiatives to seven. Of those, the most recently launched was mobile tipping, which the company introduced during International Housekeepers Week earlier this month.
Wyndham partnered with béné to allow guests to tip housekeepers and other staff via their mobile device and a QR code, all at no cost to franchisees because of a small guest-service fee that covers each transaction.
“The housekeeper just puts a tent card with a QR code in the room identifying themselves,” said Dow. “If it’s a $5 tip, a little service fee gets added to cover the credit card or the ApplePay charges.”
Once the tip is made, it can either be integrated through payroll or put directly on debit cards for the employees. “You just hand out debit cards to your employees; the tips go straight to them,” he said.
Through research conducted by béné, mobile tipping is a boon for employees. The study found that it generates an average increase of $4.50 per hour in staff compensation, a 30% increase in monthly staff retention and a 5x increase in tip frequency.
“It is actually a benefit the hotel can sell when it’s hiring folks,” said Strickland. “[It can say,] ‘We have digital tipping. We have debit cards that are going to get topped up on a daily basis.’”
For Scott LePage, president, Americas, Wyndham, the addition of mobile tipping is a way for the company to show its appreciation for its housekeepers’ hard work. “We can tell our housekeepers who are within the Wyndham system that we’re continuing to invest in initiatives and efforts that show them not just appreciation, but help them with a critical component of their income by making tipping much easier,” he said.
Scott LePage Wyndham Hotels & Resorts
It is also a benefit to guests. “I do feel there’s a lot of times where a guest doesn’t have cash or may not necessarily be familiar with it,” he said. “And, in the newer generation, they’re just more used to electronic transactions. So, having that to celebrate is a big win for the industry, for us as an organization and, more importantly, for the housekeepers.”
In early October, the company plans a full launch of a new monetized WiFi system. “The top of the list of our initiatives is rock-solid WiFi, which is critical,” said Dow. “The way you can pay for some of that rock-solid WiFi is with upgrades. We have a new consolidated landing page.”
He said that the company likes to give flexibility to its franchisees for WiFi. “They can choose amongst our approved suppliers, but we are going to roll out an integrated landing page that sits on top of all that, no matter who they have for the WiFi in the building—as long as it meets our requirements, and the right speeds,” he said. “If guests want that premium experience, they can click a button, pay a few extra dollars and get really fast WiFi.”
When the guest authenticates the WiFi on their television, it automatically gives them access to streaming from any devices that are connected. “It is a cool feature for guests to have,” said Dow. “The nice thing is that it’s not more expensive. Our hotels pay a lot for free-to-guest services…so it is really not a net increase in cost to have something like this.”
Wyndham is working on a program to offer branded EV chargers at its hotels.
One of the technology initiatives that surprised Strickland and his team was electric vehicle (EV) charging. “Our franchisees want electric-vehicle charging stations,” he said. “We have that on our list, but it wasn’t in our top seven… They said they wanted to look ahead and differentiate, and do something new.”
While the exact launch date for Wyndham’s EV charging stations has not yet been locked in, the company did reveal that it’s working with vendors who will also provide monetization opportunities beyond the cost of charging vehicles. “There is the ability for advertising—both national and local opportunities,” said Dow. “It can actually fund itself. You generate revenue on the charging and on the advertising.”
Strickland sees the offering of Wyndham EV charges to franchisees as a major benefit for them. “By being part of the Wyndham brand, we have taken the hard work out for the franchisees,” he said. “We pre-negotiated the contract. The suppliers are going to walk them through subsidies that are available. It is going to be part of our loyalty app… Now, when guests are searching for a hotel on the app, they can narrow it down by properties that have an EV charger.”
Other technology areas that the company has also launched mobile check-in and checkout and digital key, as well as guest texting, which are all important to the guests and franchisees.
Ajit Patel, who owns the Days Inn by Wyndham Pensacola – Historic Downtown, is one of those franchisees. He has partnered with the company for more than 20 years and serves on one of the franchisee advisory councils. He has seen the growth of the technology firsthand. “It’s come a long way,” he said. “The evolution has been remarkable.”
Ajit Patel Days Inn by Wyndham Pensacola – Historic Downtown
LePage said he is amazed by all of the innovations the IT team has made with the technology. “What I think is unique about what we’re doing from a Wyndham perspective is partnering the technology with the operations initiatives,” he said. “At the end of the day, we’re still in the hospitality business. It’s about the quality of the stay and all the things that we can build around that stay, from the guest experience to the cleanliness of the room to WiFi and other digital services. It’s an exciting time to be at Wyndham, where we’re really pushing forward to innovate in those areas. And, it’s been great to see that the guests are reacting, and our scores are moving in the right direction. So, we’re going to keep pushing to make sure this has found that path.”
