Best Western Hotels is bringing its 4,000 properties and 18 brands under the WorldHotels master brand to improve the guest experience while maintaining the individual brands.
The move, announced to hotel owners today, October 27, is part of a transformation that also combines the group’s two loyalty programs to create a unified experience with the discovery and stay.
“It's more than just a name change. It’s a symbol of our evolution, from where we’ve been, to who we really are today,” said Joelle Park, SVP and chief marketing officer of WorldHotels. “It includes a loyalty program, enhanced digital capabilities, impacts on a differentiated guest experience while preserving the individuality of each hotel.”
She added that the name better reflects the brands within the portfolio that cover all hotel segments.
Park also said the strategy is to increase direct booking.
“It’s where we can deliver the best guest experience, the lowest price, they can enroll in the loyalty program, we can take care of them on property. One of our guiding principles is get as many travelers to discover us and book direct.”
Rebuilding for AI
The franchise hotel group’s website and mobile app have been rebuilt using the Adobe platform, allowing the group to “continuously evolve the experience, personalize it based on travel or intent and introduce new capabilities at a much more rapid pace,” according to Bill Ryan, the company’s SVP and CTO.
He added that the aim is to reduce friction through simpler navigation as well as enable the individually owned hotels to highlight their properties and local areas.
The company has also invested in “richer and more relevant content,” which is increasingly important for artificial intelligence (AI) platforms, he said.
“Travelers aren't just choosing a room. They choose an experience, a neighborhood, a destination. So we've dramatically expanded the ways hotels can tell their story through enhanced property content, local recommendations, neighborhood insights and destination-focused experiences.”
Ryan added that hotels that provide rich, authentic content are most likely to succeed as travel discovery evolves.
He also said the company spent 10,000 hours interviewing its franchisees to gather the insider tips for its channels and AI platforms. World Hotels will update the content regularly to ensure it remains fresh and relevant for different kinds of guests.
“And as we continue to invest in greater personalization capabilities, we'll then also be able to take that content and highlight the most relevant content to the most relevant guest at any point in time,” Ryan said.
Part of the plan is to introduce hotel experiences into the booking journey, which has focused more on discovery to now, and use loyalty member data to understand preferences.
Ryan joined Best Western as CTO about two years ago and has been overseeing the company’s technology evolution. It announced the combination of its AutoClerk platform with cloud-based property management system Hotel Key last year as part of a modernization program.
Ryan said he decided the existing digital experience technology could not support the company’s vision and needed to be rebuilt.
The company also works with Canary Technology on its guest management platform and has partnerships with startups including DirectBooker to help boost its visibility on AI platforms.
On the company’s preparedness for AI, Ryan said visibility is where it starts, and the company has also made its availability, rates and inventory accessible to AI engines.
“Where I see this evolving, [now] the discovery happens on the AI assistant, but then they bounce you out to the website to book. The future of that is the transaction is going to happen directly within that chat. Then the next evolution of that is that it may be your personal agent talking to one of our agents. We're preparing ourselves for that evolution as well.”
An app for AI platforms, integrated with the loyalty program and bringing in the local flavor of the individual properties, is also planned for launch in 2027.