LAS VEGAS — Choice Hotels International opened its 69th Annual Convention here at the Mandalay Bay Resort yesterday with a keynote by President and CEO Patrick Pacious, who emphasized the event’s theme of “Powering the Future.”
“We live in a world where the pace of change is accelerating,” Pacious told the attendees, noting rapid advancements in social media, generative, AI, demographics and geopolitics. “In the hotel industry, we are on the cusp of some of the biggest changes in the way guests search for hotels, and in the way technology can improve your hotel's performance. It's the businesses that adapt to these changes more quickly than others that will be the winners.”
Pacious outlined Choice’s achievements and milestones from the past year. Among them:
- The company now has more than 7,500 hotels worldwide with 650,000 rooms across 46 countries and territories.
- Choice reported an increase of more than six percent year over year in converting website visitors into direct bookers as a result of the ChoiceHotels.com refresh, with upscale online booking conversion up more than 14 percent in the first quarter of 2025.
- Area directors helped owners find more than $25 million in potential operational cost savings last year, an average of $33,000 per participating property.
- A new food group-purchasing program drove an average savings of 9 percent on food costs, based on market-basket comparisons since the program launched in July 2024 to March 2025.
- In 2024, hotels that used ChoiceROCS, a consultancy program designed to help drive increased revenue by leveraging advanced data analytics to provide pricing and strategy recommendations, saw a 100-basis-point premium in RevPAR Index versus hotels not using the program. In total, ChoiceROCS drove $81 million in incremental revenue to participating properties.
- Loyalty membership has surpassed 70 million and the company reported a 30 percent increase in redemptions and 13 percent growth in average length of stay.
In Q4 2024, group business revenue increased 45 percent year over year and transient business revenue in upper-midscale rose 20 percent. Business travel now accounts for 40 percent of all stays.
Hospitality and Artificial Technology
Choice has been using artificial intelligence for years, Pacious told the attendees, but new tech innovations are driving new capabilities for hotels. “We're developing a new AI-driven rate-management tool built for your hotel type that's going to power you to truly modernize the way you manage your rate and to drive more stays from small- and mid-sized businesses,” he said. “We're building a new self-service digital platform to make it easier for those businesses to book with Choice and manage their reservations and travel programs. That's going to drive more midweek business to your hotels.”
Chief Marketing Officer Noha Abdalla said that the company’s “next-generation AI-driven guest data platform” will examine data on customers and build a profile for each of them. This will help the company to “understand our guests even better—their buying behaviors, their preferences and which channels and platforms they like to use. That way, we can send them personalized, highly targeted and even more effective messages and offers so we can get even more guests to your hotels.”
Segments
In March, Choice launched new prototypes for Comfort and Country Inn & Suites that aim to provide more revenue driving spaces for owners within the same footprint and achieve a 10 to 15 percent reduction in construction costs.
In 2024, Choice brands accounted for half of all economy and midscale extended-stay hotels open and under construction. The midscale Everhome Suites brand is set to have 25 hotels open by the end of 2025 and the company reported gross operating profits above 55 percent for the WoodSpring Suites brand.
In 2024, Choice’s upscale-and-above room count rose 44 percent to more than 110,000 rooms, and partnerships with Westgate Resorts and Preferred Hotels & Resorts have added access to a total of 180,000 upscale rooms.