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Why? They make money. And they're easier to roll out than a "hard brand." (Thus, why those are "hard.")
In 2017, we've already seen the debut of two new "soft brand" collections from major hotel companies: Tapestry Collection by Hilton was announced in January, and most recently, Wyndham announced the debut of Trademark Hotel Collection in June.
Unlike a "hard" hotel brand like a Wyndham Grand or a Hilton Hotel, a soft-brand collection like Trademark or Tapestry is meant to appeal to independent hotel owners who don't want to be beholden to the same strict standards as a hard brand, but want to benefit from a big hotel company's distribution network.
Soft brand collections aren't a new invention. Other hotel soft brands include Choice Hotels' Ascend Hotel Collection, Starwood's The Luxury Collection, Marriott's Autograph Collection, Hyatt's Unbound Collection, and Hilton's Curio Collection, to name a few.
But whereas the first crop of these collections tended to focus more on luxury to upscale hotel properties, the newest ones from Hilton and Wyndham are more geared toward the three- and four-star independent hotel. It's an effort on the part of big hotel companies to try to consolidate even more of the very large and very fragmented global independent hotel market.
Skift spoke to hotel executives from various companies during the annual NYU Hospitality Industry Investment conference to ask them for their thoughts on soft brand collections, and why you can expect to see even more of them in the near future.
Marriott CEO Arne Sorenson
Marriott International has a total of three soft-brand collections: Autograph Collection, The Luxury Collection and Tribute Portfolio. The company acquired The Luxury Collection and Tribute Portfolio when it bought Starwood Hotels & Resorts in 2016.
"I think, increasingly, folks like to have the best of both worlds," Sorenson said, when asked why soft brands continue to proliferate in the hospitality industry. "And so, in the past, one world was 'Give me the power of the reservation platform, the power of the brand, the power of the financial performance I'm going to get by being associated with the brands' or 'Let me live in a place which I give up all of that, but I have true independence and I can create something which looks unique, and maybe reflects my personality as opposed to somebody else's personality and I go forward with that.' What happened with the Autograph Collection launch was that Marriott came out and said, 'You can have an asset that has a unique personality and still live in this Marri
