Wyndham Hotel Group has announced a deal with American Hotel Income Properties REIT Inc. for the conversion of 44 existing hotels throughout the United States into brands such as Wyndham’s Baymont Inn & Suites, Travelodge, and Super 8. In addition to this, the new deal would also see AHIP acquire two new hotels that will then join Wyndham’s portfolio, making for a total of 46 new properties to join the hospitality giant’s existing 8,300 hotels located throughout the globe.
These new properties will be located entirely in the United States, where Wyndham already has a strong presence consisting of midscale and economic hotel options in booming hospitality markets such as Nashville and Kansas City, as well as some lesser known cities such as Jefferson City, Mo.; Lincoln, Neb.; and Buffalo, N.Y. The 44 existing hotels included in this agreement will break down like this: 14 will join Wyndham’s Baymont Inn & Suites brand, 28 will join its Travelodge brand, and two will join its Super 8 brand. In regards to the two new properties being acquired as part of this landmark deal, one has recently been converted to the Days Inn brand while the other is going to be rebranded under a different Wyndham brand in the near future. Also, these hotels will continued to be managed by ONE Lodging Management Inc., which is AHIP’s exclusive hotel manager.
So far, 2017 has been a busy year for Wyndham Hotel Group in terms of acquisitions, with last month seeing the company acquire AmericInn, which for those who don’t know is a midscale brand that has 200 hotels, largely spread throughout the American Midwest. Year to date, Wyndham has added nearly 200 hotels to its overall North American portfolio, much of it falling into the asset light strategy designation. This is a trend that seems likely to continue as the calendar turns to 2018 and the years beyond. Wyndham’s future project pipeline for the United States includes close to 700 hotels that have a total of 63,000 rooms for guests.
This sort of asset light property acquisition is generally beneficial for both big companies like Wyndham as well as for collaborators and the individual hotels that are involved with the deals. The hotels being added to Wyndham benefit from the larger company’s power of scale, with advantages that include an experienced team, state of the art technology, and immense revenue management solutions, strategic sourcing, global sales, marketing and distributions, operations support, best in class training and affiliation with one of the hospitality industry’s most generous hotel loyalty rewards programs.