“A (substitute loyalty program name) Hotel”

Hilton’s got another five “brands” on the way; Radisson’s got an explainer for their own explainer. This desperate pursuit of another name for a building – another “bed block” – has utterly diluted brand identities. They now require an explainer just for the customer to understand what they’re supposedly getting. Who, in their right mind, remembers to “look up their brand explainer” before booking? Seriously?

Remember when a Hilton meant something specific? Now, it’s a labyrinth of “Collections,” “Autographs,” and “Curios.” Each new acquisition, each “soft brand,” muddies the waters. The original brand, built on trust, can no longer stand alone. It’s propped up by a digital Rosetta Stone. The travesty.

This relentless drive for sheer numbers is a calculated strategy: room block consolidation for the digital marketplace. It’s about leveraging against OTAs, a territorial land grab for inventory and market share. This isn’t primarily about the customer experience; it’s pure business. But what does it really mean for the guest when staring at forty-five “labels” that defy differentiation?

Adding to the exasperation: regional nuances. For example, an Accor “label” in Asia doesn’t look or deliver the same product and service as that “label” in Europe or North America. What’s considered standard or luxurious varies wildly by continent, even within a single brand family. You need an explainer for the brand and another for the region. It utterly undermines any promise of consistency.

The uncomfortable truth is if the core idea was to push the customer into ambivalence about the actual label on the building – valuing the loyalty program plastic card over unique experience – it’s working. We’ve traded genuine brand identity for loyalty program stickiness. It’s a gamble the average traveler will eventually just shrug, “Whatever, just give me points.”

The Proliferation of Labels

Here’s a quick look at how many “labels” some of the top players are peddling:

Look at those numbers! It’s bewildering. We’re drowning in choices, yet starved for genuine differentiation. It’s an exercise in quantity over quality, a race to create more “bed blocks” while meaning evaporates. The risk, of course, is that making the customer ambivalent to the label eventually makes them ambivalent to the entire ecosystem. If everything is just a point-generating machine, we might just be training customers to value the plastic card more than inherent hospitality.

This leads to a chilling thought: a future where sheer disorientation collapses all “labels” back to a single, amorphous “brand,” with a free-for-all on product/service. A “Bonvoy Hotel,” perhaps – a generic placeholder. It sounds efficient, almost futuristic. But it also sounds like a hotel stripped of its soul, where individuality and genuine service are casualties of extreme commoditization.

Life is so tech. What am I getting?

Mark Fancourt