The Big Interview – Holiday Inn

Chris Hale, Head of London 2012 for IHG, speaks to Sportindustry.biz about Holiday Inn’s role as the Official Hotel Provider to the London 2012 Games.

Obviously demand will be high for rooms during the Games, what are the rules in terms of price inflation?

“To give a little background on the hotel industry in London, back in 2005 when the city was putting together its bid to be a host city candidate for the Olympic Games, the bid team were very keen to get the support of the hotel industry. Hotels at previous Games have often overpriced and it does impact the appeal of that city for fans, tourists, the IOC and everyone else associated with the Olympics.

So right at the start of the bidding process the hotel industry – not just IHG, but Hilton, Marriott and all the branded hotels – agreed with LOCOG that we would provide LOCOG’s accommodation needs at a fair price. LOCOG needs 45,000 rooms per night at the Games and we are providing them for the average rate over the past four years on that day. 

Of course, because there was a recession in that time period, the price we are supplying the rooms to LOCOG are below market rate, ignoring the Olympics, just a normal summer’s day, it is below market rate.

Most hotels in London have given around 65% of their rooms to LOCOG at below market rate so during the Games all these hotels in London are effectively offering lower rates than normal. 

In terms of the remaining rooms, we have 35 hotels in London with two thirds of the rooms going to LOCOG. The final third of rooms are now on the open market and the prices, just like airlines, vary. 

Of course, with supply and demand there will be rooms with higher rates then normal, but this won’t be universal, particularly if people book early.”

So there are no set rules on the prices of those final 35%?

“In our company most of the hotels are franchised so we cannot set prices across those hotels. However, we can give our owners advice on the range that they should be setting their prices in, but we won’t set any rules for our hotels.”

In terms of activation, you have already launched Masterclasses and augmented reality, have you got anything else lined up?

“When we became an official sponsor of the Games, we agreed with LOCOG that we would help run the Olympic village. We are bringing in around 90 of our staff from around the world to be the management for the village. We have 17,000 athletes and officials staying during Games-time and we have recruited our best staff from around the world to look after the place. We have employees arriving from all over the world including China, Europe, Australia, Serbia and the US.

We have these 90 members of staff coming, 13 of which have already started work in the village, and they will be making a real difference to the athletes during the event.

An Olympic Games has never had a hotel company provide those staff and our brief from LOCOG is to provide more of a hotel experience to the athletes. Traditionally, the Olympic village is very similar to university accommodation, so we’re providing the service around that. If there are any problems with food, cleaning, towels, or anything you might have an issue with in a normal hotel, we can help with that and resolve those problems for you. We will be there at the front desk, the concierge, as well as station a general manager at each accommodation block.  

The Holiday Inn has recently been running a TV ad with BMX champ Shanaze Reade which is the mainstay of our external activation. Internally, we have been doing a lot of work to get our staff engaged in the Olympics globally. We have 330,000 staff around the world, and the challenge for us was how can we engage a third of a million people with the Olympics? 

One of the most recent ideas we incorporated was a ‘race around the world’. We asked our staff to pledge a number of kilometers that they would walk during one of their shifts, or run, cycle, swim, and we would match-fund the total, kilometer for dollar. The proceeds went to our global charity, Shelter in a Storm, which provides shelter for people who have been victims of natural disasters.

There were 60,000 members of staff participating in that scheme last month and the guys ran a total of 350,000 kilometers which is absolutely fantastic, people were even dragon boating! 

We are also a sponsor of the torch relay, and we received 72 spaces to run with the torch. We didn’t want to just give them all to senior people in our organisation though, or even people who had done well in their day job. We wanted people who had done amazing things in youth work or environment, for example, outside of work. 

On the back of this idea, we ran a peer-to-peer nomination campaign and through that we found our runners, including one man who works for Holiday Inn in Japan. He lost his three-year-old daughter in the tsunami, but the next day he still helped open the hotel to provide shelter for everyone else that lost their homes in the disaster. It’s stories like that that really help exemplify the Olympic values, so we really wanted him to run with the torch.”

You have quite a range of brand ambassadors for London 2012, what was behind the selection process?

“Holiday Inn is not a five star hotel. We are about delivering a good service to what we call the everyday hero. People who are away from home several nights a week in various hotels, that’s our core audience, and we wanted to work with athletes who we felt epitomized that. We didn’t want the big global megastar athletes, we wanted people more able to relate to our audience so we picked Shanaze (Reade) to be the face of our campaign on TV and outdoor. We think she’ll be a household favourite if she wins this summer.

We also wanted to get an interesting mix of athletes. We have got ambassadors from the Olympics and Paralympics; established athletes such as Paula Radcliffe, Mark Cavendish, Mo Farah, and up-and-coming athletes such as Ricky Balshaw, a Paralympic equestrian.”

Will you look to stay in sport following the Games?

“Traditionally we’ve not been great at winning sport business into our hotels globally, and sport is a massive business. By that I don’t mean just professional sport either, amateur sport is a growing business and on the back of the Olympics we are taking a far bigger slice of this industry, where all our hotels have been able to benefit from this sponsorship.

Holiday Inn celebrates its 60th Anniversary later this year, so we’re very excited about what the year will bring. Going forward, we will absolutely be focusing on winning this business into our hotels.

In terms of going in on a sponsorship level with sport, we have a pretty good track record already – we are a sponsor of the London Marathon for example, and we also do a lot of sponsorship work in the USA with golf and motorsport.

Would we want to continue a relationship in the Olympic space? We’ll have to see how this one goes, so short answer yes we will continue in sport. What that partnership will look like exactly, we should have more of an idea in the next six months.”