Preferred Hotels & Resorts offers not only a platform to the 650 luxury hotels in 85 countries that are its members, but it also helps them move towards critical areas such as sustainability. Lindsey Ueberroth, CEO, Preferred Hotels & Resorts, who was in India recently tells India Outbound that the Beyond Green label of Preferred Hotels & Resorts has extremely stringent membership criteria which are regularly monitored and enforced. She adds that India is one of the most important outbound travel markets for members of Preferred Hotels & Resorts.

How many hotels are part of the Preferred Hotels and what are the criteria for the membership?

We currently have about 650 hotels in 85 countries. The Preferred Hotels and Resorts brand has four collections and each of those collections has very distinct criteria. For a hotel to become a member, we look at it as destination and location within the destination and then the physical brand and service-related standards. Our team around the globe is responsible for vetting those properties once they join.

We also do third party inspections. We have a third party company that goes out and does unannounced inspections in addition to having an online reputation management tool that is benchmarking across that criteria and all the online review sites, making sure that they are aligning with the brand standards on an ongoing basis.

How has your membership grown over the past few years and which regions are best represented?

We have to take Covid-19 out of the mix, even though we actually did add hotels during the pandemic. In terms of regions, a third of our members are in the US and Latin America, a third are in Europe and a third are South Asia, Middle East, Africa and the rest of the world. The US would be the largest in terms of number of hotels followed by Europe. I think there’s markets like Africa that are really starting to take off, and same with South America, another market that we are looking to grow and add properties.

For your members outside India, how important is the Indian footfall and how do you support your members in market development in India?

Great question. India is probably one of the largest outbound markets that we are paying attention to now. Because when we look at overall demographics, not just the number of people, but when you look at and sort of the span is now available and their desire to travel, it is incredible. So how do we support them?

A lot of it has to do with our sales team here. So we have a lot of hotels that want to come to the Indian market and part of our job is to introduce them to those key decision makers, you know, especially on the travel trade side. And the other important piece is our loyalty programme. Our Preferred loyalty programme is not only building that membership base, but it is also communicating to them on where they can go.

But also, you know, growing that sort of awareness just globally. So a lot of that comes from just our team educating the member hotels around the globe. What is the potential of the market? How do you sell to them putting together relevant packages, the time of year that they might want to really focus on that? We have got 300 sales events that take place around the globe in any given year, and India would be one of those markets to offset.

What are the benchmarks for your members and how often do you monitor their quality standards?

Our quality assurance programme has the annual on property inspection that takes place along with the the reputation management tool that we are using. So they have to meet a minimum standard of 78 pc. The majority of our hotels are scoring in the high eighties and nineties, but these are stringent standards that they have to meet. If they fall below that, then just like any other brand, we put them on a property improvement plan that they have got 60 days to remedy. If they are not able to do that, then we have the ability to move them out of the brand. So we definitely maintain the brand standards.

What is the Beyond Green programme and how many overseas hotels are part of this?

We are close to 40 hotels, we are 38 now and by the end of the year, we will probably be about 42 hotels. And, you know, people keep asking me, how big do you want to grow? I say it is not about how big it is. We have not grown much faster because the criteria have been stringent. Preferred Hotels really put a lot of energy into doing this. Our inspections last two to three days. They are going in and not only evaluating what the property is doing as it is related to energy conservation, water conservation, waste management, you know, the reduce, reuse, recycle.

We are really proud of the hotels that have become members. We have got a robust pipeline, but it takes time.