Great Hotel Online article and analysis about hotel franchise fees.
Published by: Robert Mandelbaum/Hotel Online
Published date: September 2017
In the current market environment of modest growth in revenue, hotel owners and operators are paying extra attention to their operating expenses. Per the June 2017 edition of Hotel Horizons®, RevPAR growth in the U.S. is forecast to remain under 3.0 percent from 2018 through 2021. Therefore, it will be management’s ability to control expenses that will enable profits to grow.
One expense that management has less control over are franchise fees. Most of the fees charged by the franchising companies (brands) are assessed as a percent of a source of revenue. Therefore, owners and operators have mixed emotions when franchise-related costs rise. After all, if you are paying more franchise fees, then it is likely that your property’s revenue is also on the rise.
To assist hotel management and ownership in their assessment of the franchise-related costs they are paying, we have analyzed data from 1,587 U.S. hotels that reported franchise fee payments each year from 2010 through 2016. The data comes from our firm’s annual Trends® in the Hotel Industry survey of operating statements from thousands of hotels across the nation. Some of these properties are owned and/or operated by a brand. Others license the brand, but are operated independently, or by a third-party management company.
In our Trends® database we capture four different franchise-related fees on a discrete basis. They are:
- Royalty Payments
- Marketing Assessments
- Reservation Fees
- Guest Loyalty Program Fees
To read the entire article, click here.
