BWH Hotels would make the Founding Fathers proud. Where most public lodging companies follow a top-down approach, BWH Hotels is a contrast, a non-profit membership organization where hotel owners hold voting rights and the focus isn’t on growth for the sake of growth, but, to borrow from Thomas Jefferson, life, liberty and the pursuit of a quality hotel product.
Traces of both direct and representative democracy are embedded in BWH Hotels’ composition; indeed, in 2019, its members voted down a proposal to take the company public. BWH employs a board of directors, which consists of seven members, each representing a district, who, in turn, choose governors. Measures are passed by majority votes of varying thresholds depending on the proposal.
Like a democracy, there is an elected leader. At BWH, parent group of the iconic Best Western brand, that distinction rests with Larry Cuculic, who was appointed CEO in 2021, taking over for David Kong, who had held the role for 17 years. Cuculic is spindly with a shiny pate, a West Point grad who in the mid-1970s played basketball under coaching legend, Mike Krzyzewski. Cuculic is well over six feet tall, but, perhaps, his biggest distinction among peers is his public persona. On conference panel sessions, he routinely bounds on stage carrying a large, black binder, as if ready to take a deposition (Cuculic was general counsel at Best Western prior to becoming CEO), giving the appearance of an eager and overly prepared executive, who doesn’t want to go off book, but he can also riff with the best of them.
For a former cadet, strict attention to detail is a prevailing trait and a necessity when leading a company with 18 brands, from economy through to luxury, and one which generated $8.5 billion in global hotel revenue in the past year alone. It’s a journey that didn’t happen overnight and one that went through the ratification steps. Up until 2010, Best Western was, well, just Best Western—a single brand with roots stretching back to the 1940s as a referral service for hotels. By the end of the aughts, most of Best Western’s competitors maintained multiple brands, either launched internally or through acquisition. In 2010, Best Western passed a ballot approving three descriptors: Best Western, Best Western Plus and Best Western Premier, to better catalogue and differentiate the breadth of its product.
“That was a result of our members understanding and recognizing we need to distinguish the variety of hotels we offer guests,” Cuculic said. “There was a business case for it.” Longtime BWH executive Ron Pohl, president of international operations and president of WorldHotels, BWH’s luxury soft brand, picked up on the business case for it: hotel performance. “When you have all hotels in the same bucket, then there’s a perception that they should all be priced about the same,” he said, when, in actuality, there were Best Westerns across segments, some having the ability to drive higher rates than others. “We had hotels in different levels, but we were positioning them all the same. Once [it changed], it had a positive effect. It really was a strategic approach.”
The flood gates didn’t lift from there, but the dike was breached. Three years later, Best Western launched a boutique concept in Vib and a soft brand, BW Premier Collection. From there, the brands filed in: another boutique concept, a white label economy/midscale brand and, in 2019, the acquisition of WorldHotels, which put Best Western squarely into the luxury space. Today, across all its brands, BWH encompasses some 4,300 hotels worldwide, inclusive of its development pipeline, and attracts owners, in part, because it is known to be less prescriptive when it comes to brand standards than some of its competitors.
And though hotel companies formulate and structure new brands, they ostensibly don’t create them, according to Cuculic, consumers do. “We recognize what consumer demands are,” he said. Consider Aiden, an upscale, lifestyle conversion brand that BWH launched in 2018 and allows owners to reposition assets into a higher segment. As Cuculic told it, “Owners recognized they wanted to change platforms and leverage our marketing and sales and technology platforms.” Soon-to-come Aidens include New York Times Square, Palm Beach, Fla., Dallas/Fort Worth, Kansas City and Newark, N.J.
ACROSS THE BOARD
Around this time, BWH identified that it had a business model that allowed it to evolve far from a single-minded hotel company to one able to fill gaps up and down the chain scale. In all its extensions, it trades on what Cuculic refers to as the “goodwill” set by Best Western, like in SureStay, which allows BWH to leverage its heritage into the premium-economy segment and now has some 450 hotels since the brand’s 2016 launch.
Boutique brands like Glo and Vib have had their stops and starts, constrained by the current capital market distaste for new construction. In 2019, BWH made an acquisition that at the time may not have stopped people in their tracks, but, to hear it from Pohl, was pivotal—the missing piece to fill in the blanks of upper-upscale and luxury. WorldHotels, which started in Europe and has a five-decade legacy, at the time consisted of 300 hotels, tiered in three separate categories: WorldHotels Luxury, WorldHotels Elite and WorldHotels Distinctive. BWH added a fourth, WorldHotels Crafted, for boutique properties, a level up from Aiden, Pohl explained. One of these is Zion Wildflower Resort, a glamping property that opened in March in Utah’s Zion National Park.
“We recognize that to compete long term, you must have representation in all segments of the business,” Pohl said. WorldHotels is an affiliation brand composed of independent hotels. It still is, but that is changing, Pohl said. There are currently six hard-branded WorldHotels, such as The Majestic Ponta Negra Beach Hotel, WorldHotels Elite, in Brazil. “It’s a great opportunity for customers to start to recognize the brand,” Pohl said.
BWH has also stepped into the arena of branded residences through WorldHotels, another piece that moves it further on par with its peer set. It recently signed its seventh residence with projects under construction in Vietnam, Costa Rica, the Middle East, and as small as 80-unit condos up to more than 2,000.
Hotel companies are staunchly focused on all regions for growth opportunities, but the Middle East is a hotbed for brand expansion—not in the least because of bold endeavors like Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030, which seeks to diversify its economy. At the recent Future Hospitality Summit in Riyadh, BWH inked eight new deals to complement its existing 19 hotels in the region. Though Saudi Arabia might conjure images of glitz and glamor, exotic cars and dazzling real estate, three of the projects BWH signed were for SureStay properties in Jeddah and Madinah. “The one difference is that they have the money to do it,” Pohl said. “It’s not a matter of financing.” Coupled with, as Cuculic pointed out, government supporting growth.
SOLDIER MENTALITY
Sitting on Cuculic’s bookcase, in his office in Phoenix at BWH’s headquarters, is “The History of Modern Warfare.” Cuculic resists the notion that his entire leadership style is pulled from his military experience, but it’s also ineluctable. “I don’t do it intentionally, but it happens,” he said. His leadership ethos is pretty simple, he said: Lead with purpose, honesty and integrity and take care of people. Like a general, Cuculic watches out for his troops. At member meetings, he makes it a point to eat last.
If Cuculic is the general, Pohl is his loyal lieutenant general. He looks the part: An avid runner, cyclist, he completed The Spartan Trifecta recently—a series of three endurance races in one year. His experience is peerless, having worked in many facets of the hotel industry, working at a management company and at one point as a general manager. He’s been on the brand side now with BWH for 18 years.
For someone who travels for a living, staying in tip-top shape is key. “It does affect how well you can work when you’re in different time zones,” he said.
BWH doesn’t answer to shareholders; it serves its members. Funds are used to support hotels through technology and sales and marketing. In late 2024, BWH hired Bill Ryan as its CTO to spearhead the company’s digital transformation to meet guest expectations. BWH is also working on merging WorldHotels Rewards and Best Western Rewards.
Last year, BWH launched a new marketing campaign, punchy, authentic spots set to a cover of “The Weight” by The Band. In one, a voice-over says: “Today, we accomplished nothing. I mean it—not a thing. And it was kinda everything… Life’s a trip. Make the most of it at Best Western.” “People work hard for their dollars,” Cuculic said. “When they travel, you want to appreciate them—be gracious when they enter through the entirety of the stay. That’s what Best Western stands for.”
