Park Inn becomes “Park Inn by Radisson”
To further accelerate the growth and performance of our mid-market champion, Park Inn, we are taking a bold new step in the brand’s future evolution. As revealed earlier today by Kurt Ritter, our President & CEO, Park Inn will now become “Park Inn by Radisson”.
Endorsing the Park Inn brand through Radisson was a conscious and well-informed decision to build a stronger filial link between Rezidor’s two core brands. Together with our board of directors and other advisors, we considered various options to lift the brand awareness of Park Inn among travellers. After much deliberation, we established that a brand endorsement is the most effective way forward.
The brand extension will allow Park Inn to build on the greater strength and more established reputation of Radisson Blu – Europe’s largest upscale hotel brand. This will enable us to entrench the existing perception among travellers which places Park Inn at the upper end of the highly lucrative and fast growing mid-market, with F&B segment.
Brand endorsement is not new to our industry and several leading hotel companies have benefitted greatly from affiliation opportunities to support their upcoming brands. Some of the most notable examples are Courtyard by Marriott, Hilton Garden Inn, Aloft, a vision of W Hotels, Element by Westin, to name a few.
We are confident of the benefits this small but significant change will bring to our fresh and youthful brand. Our new name will help us in our bid to boost both growth and profits, in line with Rezidor’s recently re-iterated strategy of focusing on growing Park Inn and Radisson Blu as our core brands.
With this change, we hope to achieve a more rapid increase in brand awareness for both Park Inn and Radisson Blu by essentially doubling our ability to achieve a brand impression with frequent travellers through the separate marketing activities of each brand.
From an operations perspective, I want to assure you all from the outset that the transition to “Park Inn by Radisson” has been designed to minimise the costs associated with a change, and maximise operational and brand promotion synergies.
The name change will be a gentle evolutionary process across EMEA: a slight, but important amendment to help us move onwards and upwards by adding an instantly recognisable link to the Radisson Blu brand.
As a prime activity, we are launching a dedicated marketing, sales and advertising campaign to connect Park Inn to Radisson, and reveal our new logo, name and ambition.
Our secondary activity is to modify the principle signage on hotel exteriors with priority on markets where Park Inn’s brand awareness will achieve the fastest lift as a result of the support of the Radisson brand. This means that not all exterior signage has to change!
The rebranding will start in the United Kingdom, a key home market for Park Inn and an equally important territory for Radisson Blu. Signage conversions in other territories will follow over a gradual roll out.
Directional signage, internal signage, business cards and other in-house collateral will remain in many cases unaltered or updated as you run out of stock. No existing collateral will be destroyed. Where appropriate, it will simply be replaced with the new logo naturally and over time. For many applications the existing logo will continue to be used as our new graphic standards anticipate instances where the “by Radisson” endorsement cannot be used due to media or space limitations, guest bathroom amenities as an example.
Quite naturally, all new Park Inn hotels will be opened and branded as “Park Inn by Radisson”.
We hope to complete the transition of all our Park Inn hotels to Park Inn by Radisson, by the end of 2011, which allows sufficient time to plan and execute the change.
We have experienced, over the last two years, changes in the marketplace that have dramatically reshaped our industry. As one of the world’s leading hotel companies, we want to be a step ahead of change and deliver on our promises.
Welcome to Park Inn by Radisson!
