The Intercontinental Hotels Group (IHG) has over 4,000 hotels worldwide. IHG owns Holiday Inn (a medium-price hotel chain), Holiday Inn Express (a budget chain), Candlewood Suites (a chain of self-catering aparthotels in the United States), Staybridge Suites (self-catering aparthotels operating worldwide), Crowne Plaza (upmarket hotels in gateway locations), and Hotel Indigo (boutique hotels), which have very individual rooms and ‘arty' surroundings.

The purpose of having so many different brands is to capture a wide market from the different groups of people who regularly stay in hotels. Holiday Inn is a low-end business hotel, but the chain does a lot of business with families at weekends. A room in a Holiday Inn has two double beds, so it is perfectly feasible for a family with two children to share a room, thus creating the opportunity for a relatively cheap weekend away. Since the key to success in the hotel business is to keep the room occupancy rate high, catering to these two distinct markets has a considerable advantage.

Candlewood and Staybridge Suites cater for people who need an extended stay, perhaps for a few weeks. Having self-catering facilities rather than eating in restaurants all the time is a major money-saver for such people, as they are able to prepare meals themselves. Since many people prefer not to eat in restaurants on their own, this can be a big selling-point. Hotel Indigo provides an experience. The chain is designed for the fun-seeker, for someone who will enjoy staying in a very individual, unusual hotel. Most of the guests are likely to be couples on romantic breaks, but there will also be a steady stream of business people with a liking for the unusual. Holiday Inn Express is a budget chain, sited mainly in edge-of-town or near-airport locations where land is cheap.

The main market is the traveller who does not intend to spend much time actually in the hotel, but is either looking for somewhere to break a long journey, or is perhaps catching an early flight.

Intercontinental is also part of IHG and has over 200 hotels in 75 countries. Intercontinental is known for its luxurious rooms and buildings, and for the high quality of its staff training. The hotels are not the standardised, made-from-the-same-mould entities that characterise many other hotel chains but are intended to reflect local styles and circumstances. For example, the Intercontinental in Lusaka, Zambia, has a dining room which is open to the gardens and swimming-pool on one side, so that guests effectively eat in the open air. This would obviously be impossible in a colder climate, but guests enjoy the tropical atmosphere, and the hotel is often used for business meetings as a result.

Intercontinental provides upmarket accommodation for international travellers. The bulk of the guests are business people, so the hotels provide excellent business facilities, including meeting rooms, conference centres, secretarial services, fax machines, internet facilities, and a concierge desk with a ‘can-do' attitude and knowledge of local facts and figures. For people staying at these hotels, cost is very much less important than the level of service and comfort. A busy executive who is recovering from a ten-hour flight and a five-hour time difference may still need to make several urgent phone calls, check emails, and find a good local restaurant for dinner with a client the following night. Intercontinental is skillful at meeting all those needs.

Intercontinental advertises on such global TV channels as CNN, and in business-oriented publications such as Fortune and The Economist, but otherwise the company does not promote itself very widely. It does have an effective website, on which concierges from the hotels can be seen on video giving a resident's-eye view of their cities. This is a very useful facility for travellers about to stay at an Intercontinental.

Intercontinental provides a reassuring familiarity coupled with a local flavour for business and leisure travellers. Knowing that an Intercontinental hotel is available in the destination country is reassuring for people who have a great deal more urgent matters on their mind than researching hotels in foreign countries.

Required:

You are to assume the role of a Marketing Assistant for Intercontinental. Produce a report for your Marketing Manager that addresses the following tasks.

(a) Explain how these marketing techniques have ensured a competitive advantage.

(b) Produce FOUR marketing objectives for Intercontinental.

(c) Describe how performance against these objectives could be monitored.

(d) Evaluate how Intercontinental could adjust the elements of the extended marketing mix (7Ps) to create greater appeal to leisure travellers, as opposed to business travellers.