NEW YORK— Three months to the day it had a soft rollout for its mammoth loyalty program, TripRewards, Cendant Corp.’s hotel group has added more than 300,000 new members and expects that number to easily climb in the months ahead. The new members give the fledgling program 2 million members to date; 1.7 million existing loyalty guests were transitioned to Trip Rewards from former programs within the franchisor’s nine lodging brands. At a reception here designed to get the word out about the new program, which after a lengthy development period quietly debuted Dec. 8, 2003, Steven Rudnitsky, hotel group chairman/CEO, said, “We’ve really leveled the playing field really on two fronts, in my mind: First and foremost from a competitive standpoint for us, but also from a traveler’s standpoint. Obviously, it’s very good for business travelers, but this program is also very skewed to the leisure traveler as well.” Cendant’s capital investment into the program is approximately $10 million. With 6,000 hotels, 49 point-earning partners and in excess of 140 point-redeeming options, Cendant is touting the long-anticipated TripRewards as the worlds largest loyalty program, based on the number of participating hotels. The program runs across all its lodging chains— AmeriHost Inn, Days Inn, Howard Johnson, Knights Inn, Ramada, Super 8, Travelodge, Villager, Wingate Inn— and replaces six proprietary brand loyalty programs such as Club Ramada or the VIP program for Super 8. Cendants vacation ownership brands, Fairfield Resorts and Trendwest Resorts, will introduce time-share owners to the program later this year. Cendant’s franchisees also are top of mind with the new program. Peter Strebel, svp/hotel marketing and the “father” of the program, told HOTEL BUSINESS® the company expected a slight increase— albeit “less than .5%— in RevPAR based on TripRewards. Jill Noblett, vp/loyalty and direct marketing, noted: “It’s basically how we communicated the program to the franchisees: ‘We’re going to get you more business from customers who are going to try it and we’re going to get you incremental business from your existing customers are going to come back and stay more.’” As previously reported by HOTEL BUSINESS® (Feb. 7, 2004), TripRewards members may elect to earn either TripRewards points, airline miles or rail points for their hotel stays and can redeem their points for either hotel stays (with no blackout dates) or partner rewards, including airline tickets, resort vacations, electronics, home appliances, sporting goods, movie and theme park tickets and gift certificates from 46 retailers and restaurants. Brand names range from Burger King, JCPenney, Tumi, Sony to The Home Depot, Starbucks and Toys R Us, and many others are in the mix. “We wanted to create a program for people who may not be on the road as much as the traditional business traveler. We wanted to speak to people who are occasional travelers and leisure travelers,” said Strebel. “We’re exposing a loyalty program to people to customers who have not really been exposed to loyalty programs before and we’re going to give them something extra, something to get excited about.”
Peter Strebel