The Great Hotel Branding

**Carol Massar** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:08)
You're listening to Bloomberg Businessweek with Carol Massar and Tim Stenovec on Bloomberg Radio.

**Tim Stenovec** (0:14)
You're not going nuts, don't worry. Hotel rooms are all starting to look the same, whether you're paying $500 a night or $1,500 a night.

**Carol Massar** (0:24)
Listen, there's a little quiz on the website, and it's three hotels, and you have to put what they cost.

**Tim Stenovec** (0:31)
And nobody will get these right.

**Carol Massar** (0:32)
I got one right, you got one right.

**Tim Stenovec** (0:34)
No, and you can do it in Kyoto, you can do it in Miami. Brandon Presser would know. He's been to more than 3,000 hotels. He spends an average of 200 nights on the road each year. He recently wrote about what he calls, quote, the great hotel blending.
Brandon Presser as Bloomberg Pursuits Travel Columnist. He's on the road as he usually is. So why are all hotels starting to look the same, whether you're paying $1,500 a night or $500 a night?

**Brandon Presser** (0:59)
Well, I think the answer is actually more complicated than it seems. I think that we can think about big corporations and the pipelines where they all buy the same beds and the same nightstands from the same places. But the answer is actually a lot more complicated and has to do with human behavior too.

**Carol Massar** (1:22)
What do you mean?

**Brandon Presser** (1:25)
We travel, it seems like we travel a lot more and in a way we do, but our trips have become a lot shorter over the last 100 years. And we don't dress up for different activities like we used to. We dress more casually now. So we use less storage space in a hotel as well.
So all of these things are being taken out of hotels like drawers and closets, and they're not being replaced with anything.

**Carol Massar** (1:52)
That is so true. And I will say, like we do a lot of quick trips.

**Tim Stenovec** (1:56)
Don't even make me.

**Carol Massar** (1:57)
OK. Well, I do carry a lot.

**Tim Stenovec** (1:58)
Don't even make me go there.

**Carol Massar** (1:59)
But there's a lot of times, if I'm just there for a couple of days, I'm living out of my suitcase even. Like, you know what I mean? So that I can quickly, because we just have to, you know.
I carry a lot of suitcases. This is his point, Brandon. So he's laughing. But I agree with you. There's like, there's the closet, and there's the thing to lay your suitcase on, but there's not a lot of storage stuff.

**Tim Stenovec** (2:20)
But that's not even, I mean, that's part of the story, but isn't a big part of the story to the consolidation that we've seen with Marriott and basically two other hotel companies that own a good portion of the hotels?

**Brandon Presser** (2:34)
Yeah, absolutely. There's sort of a big six. And basically, it accounts for over 60 percent of the world's hotels are basically owned by six corporations.
And if you're someone who wants to open a hotel, you're sort of incentivized to bring them in to manage your hotel because they have access to this pipeline. So everything becomes cheaper. It's an easier investment. And then you get to slap the name of a fancy hotel on your property. And the value of that property will increase instantly, you know, because it's, you know, now it's Park Hyatt.

**Carol Massar** (3:07)
Listen, the other thing I would say, right, Brandon? I mean, a hotel that will remain nameless. But when it first came out and it was kind of cool and it was a boutique hotel, but it was super dark, right? And for those of us, and it was very much a part of like the business choices, that you'd go there.
Don't, don't, sounds like. But it's just like, I get who it was for, but like we'd be there for work and like, I'd be like, I need a light. I can't see anything. So I guess what I would say is that hotels want to be, you know, it's like when you're selling a house, you paint everything white or cream, right? You don't want to offend anybody because you just want to sell it. Same thing with a hotel room. You want to go in, you want to be, it's relaxing, right? You don't want to play around with too many crazy pieces of art or something, or a crazy rug or bedspread that people are like, I really don't like it. I want to be out of here.