Mr. Sweiger

Food & Beverage

New Clarion eMenu Program Changing the Catering Sales Game

New brand focus aimed at capturing more group business

By Dan Sweiger, Senior Director, Brand Strategy, Choice Hotels International, Inc.

As a result of extensive research and consultation with Clarion franchisees, Choice Hotels International has embarked upon a 3-year strategy to reposition Clarion as a “focused service” hotel for the midscale “gatherings” market. What is focused service? A more targeted, streamlined and efficient way to meet the on-site food and beverage needs of today’s corporate and group hotel guests. It means eschewing the old fashioned definition of “restaurant” as a traditional sit-down, three-meal facility, and focusing on more flexible ways to meet guest needs for convenient meals. This could include basic menu offerings provided in a multi-use space.

It means doing less, and making it mean more.

Clarion is a mid-scale, full-service brand franchised by Choice Hotels International. Clarion, with nearly 200 hotels open in the United States, has on average the largest room counts of any brand in the Choice system, with hotels averaging nearly 150 rooms. As larger assets, these hotels typically have meeting space. And in this economic environment, group business is very valuable.

The Clarion team is on a mission to establish itself as the hotel that “helps people come together.” Its focus is to become the leader in the underserved midscale gatherings market – which represents 70 to 90 million room nights annually. These gatherings include a wide range of occasions where people want to get together for a shared experience, from corporate meetings to weddings, reunions and weekend getaways. The brand team determined that a focused service approach better suits the needs of this large market. In concept testing, a more streamlined offering of basic am and pm meals, and lobby lounge and carry-out in lieu of room service generated significantly higher consumer interest.

“In this economy, group business is very valuable and we’re committed to helping our owners and operators drive property-level revenue,” said Amy Crouch, Clarion director of brand strategy. “The corporate and group markets are ones that we really feel we can capitalize on — and what we’ve developed will get the phones ringing at Clarion hotels.”

The three year plan to transition the brand to a focused service F&B platform includes three phases: catering & lounge, full hot breakfast, and evening meals and carry-out service. The team focused its efforts first on catering and lounge because these are more profitable operations and are essential to attracting group/meetings business. The brand established service-level standards that include china-glass-stainless service and a full breadth of catering offerings.

And to help its properties better compete in this market, Choice has developed a first-of-its-kind eMenu initiative.

Prior to the eMenu initiative, each hotel created its own printed catering menus. For individual hotels, menus can be expensive to develop, due to the costs associated with professional design and photography. Consequently, there was no standardization of the catering menu at the hotel level.

“We want Clarion to be known for catering,” said Tom Prykanowski, Clarion’s director of food and beverage. “What we needed to do was to provide a standardized service offering to our hotels – understanding there was no ‘one-size-fits-all’ menu each hotel would utilize. Our goal is that meeting planners can expect certain types of meals and meal service at any Clarion hotel.”

The cornerstone of this effort is the eMenu program, which is one of the many investments that Choice is making in Clarion as zeroes in on Phase 1 of its strategy: catering and lounge. The team sought to have a consistent look and feel for each of its hotel’s catering menus, knowing that the foods it served would differ by market. They looked at a number of off-the-shelf options for developing a menu that would give each hotel a good online presence, help the brand be identified as a leader in catering, and offer properties a tool they can use to book business. Unfortunately, such an innovative solution did not exist.

Choice challenged its IT professionals to devise a Web-based program that would enable hotel operators to easily create professional looking menus, with the ability to change pricing, offer promotions, and produce customized editions for specific group functions.

They created a multifaceted program that generates marketing opportunities for hotel operators by letting them create online and print menus. Franchisees simply upload their menu selections via an eMenu builder on ChoiceCentral.com, the company’s intranet. The program offers two menu templates, one for corporate catering and one for weddings. Many hotels will outsource their catering food preparation, but all will market their catering via the brand’s new online eMenu.

As more consumers are using the Internet to shop for hotels that host meetings and events, Choice has invested extensively in search engine optimization of the eMenu for each Clarion hotel. The Choice eCommerce team adds meta tags for the top catering-related search terms in each hotel’s market, so its eMenu will show up in popular search engines when consumers search for catering-related key words in that particular market.

Then, Choice uploads the material directly to the hotel’s home page on Choicehotels.com, where it is presented in a 3D graphical “page flip” format with advanced functionality. The property can email a link to clients, save all or selected pages as a PDF file, print it out themselves, or even automatically upload it to popular social media applications like Facebook and Twitter. Being web-based, the eMenu is viewable from most smart phones without the need of a special application.

This state-of-the-art eMenu program, which also features professional graphic design, photography and proofreading, is offered free of charge to all Clarion hotels. It is part of a multi-faceted program that focuses on helping hotels more effectively market and sell their catering services.

“The more Clarion properties utilize this resource, the more group business they are likely to capture,” said Tom Prykanowski, director of Clarion food & beverage.

And to help their hotels be more effective when the phone rings, the brand is providing mandatory catering sales training certification – also free of charge – for every property. Helping to establish a sales culture, the eight-module online training course covers the breadth of the sales process from prospecting to event delivery and post-event follow-up.

For additional operational support, Choice also created a comprehensive online F&B Resources Center.
“It’s the do-it-yourself resource,” said Prykanowski, with hundreds of pages of content available free of charge to Clarion franchisees, including training, guidelines, open-source forms and industry contacts.

“As a brand, we need to be great at serving groups,” noted Crouch. “We’re giving our hotels the whole package, not just a menu tool – so we can help our properties drive revenue and fill their meeting spaces. This new eMenu is a marketing tool that lets meeting planners know what they are getting for at a certain price point in a professionally packaged offering. And franchisees have a resource now that enables them to reach customers in so many different ways.”

By design, the menus showcase the most popular items to meeting planners while still allowing hotels to highlight their breadth of capabilities.

With the full understanding that it is a big undertaking to change a catering menu at a hotel, the Clarion brand team is giving each hotel nine months to implement the new eMenu program. Beta testing was done at several properties, with the Choice team working closely with the elected leadership of Choice’s franchisee association. Hotels have until February 2012 to be up and running with the new menu, but already it has been adopted by several properties, including hotels from coast to coast in markets including Wichita, San Diego, Atlantic City, Madison, and Lexington.

Response to the newly introduced initiative has been enthusiastic.

“Our corporate clients liked the idea that they didn’t have to wait for a callback before planning their meal budgets,” said Potique Johnson, general manager of the Clarion Inn in Williamsburg, Iowa. Using the eMenu for weddings, Johnson noted that brides got “a clear understanding right up front as to whether they would be able to budget for an event at our hotel.”

David Chavez, the banquet manager at Clarion Hotel in San Diego, noted that in the few months since he began using eMenus, the program has already generated business for the property. He attributed booking three major events to the eMenus.

Choice is complementing these and other efforts to publicize Clarion’s catering and meeting services with initiatives to drive that business to its franchisees. Choice recently partnered with HelmsBriscoe, the global leader in meetings procurement and the largest producer of group hotel business in the world, to develop business opportunities for its properties.

The brand will have the strength of Choice’s global sales team behind it, who will be marketing the Clarion brand’s offerings for small gatherings to key clients and meeting planners. SMERF meetings and corporate training events are among the natural fits for the Clarion brand.

“With the eMenus, we are setting a favorable, strong impression of Clarion from the get-go,” noted Prykanowski. The individual booking the meeting and catering will find the eMenus, have the confidence that we’ve got a top-notch catering offering and pick up the phone and call the hotel and arrange their event.”

From a corporate point of view, the eMenu program is an important element in Choice Hotels’ campaign to create a more consistent, professional, and well-defined image for the brand—and to publicize its new focus on gatherings.

“Choice is investing significantly to deliver on the new Clarion brand strategy,” said Steve Joyce, president and CEO of Choice Hotels. “Its success is extremely important to Choice.”

“This is a good time to be a Clarion franchisee,” declared Crouch. “Thanks to Choice’s extensive commitment to Clarion, this is a brand that’s clearly on the move.”

Dan Sweiger is senior director of brand strategy for the Quality Inn, Clarion, Econo Lodge and Rodeway Inn brands at Choice Hotels International, Inc. (NYSE:CHH), one of the world's largest hotel franchisors. In this position, Mr. Sweiger develops and executes strategic plans to ensure that the product and service attributes of these brands meet the current and evolving needs of guests, are aligned with marketing and franchise services strategies, support development efforts, and provide a compelling return on investment for the company’s franchisees. Mr. Sweiger joined Choice in 2009 from InterContinental Hotels Group, where he worked on domestic and global brand management for the Holiday Inn and Holiday Inn Express brands. He also has over a decade of experience in consumer packaged goods with Sara Lee, Kellogg’s, and Pillsbury. Mr. Sweiger holds a master’s degree in business administration from Purdue University’s Krannert Graduate School of Management. Mr. Sweiger can be contacted at 301-592-5190 or Dan_Sweiger@choicehotels.com Extended Bio...

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