A look at the bright side

I had a fascinating chat with Wayne Goldberg, President and CEO of LaQuinta, about the challenges and promise of the select service hotel segment. LaQuinta is growing—and fast. They have 663 hotels open, and their pipeline includes more than 200 projects. The company's hotels are getting fresh looks—from new signage to new exterior paint schemes to new designs, including the envelope-pushing "Vibrant" scheme (see bottom photo).

Goldberg feels that LaQuinta is somewhat unique in that they are both hotel owner-operators and a franchisor. Franchisors like the fact that La Quinta, "has skin in the game," he said. "We aren't asking them to do things at their hotels that we aren't in turn having to do at our 400+ corporate-owned hotels."

The current downturn isn't a huge concern for Goldberg. "This, too, shall pass," he

said. "Everything is cyclical." He notes that we have to learn from our past and the things that we have been through as an industry. Plus, he said, there are some positives. "The pipeline this time, in the upcycle, never got nearly as aggressive or as strong ... that pipeline from a growth standpoint, is not nearly as big as it has been in several of our cycles where, when the demand slowed down, you had all of these new hotels and properties ... the development this time didn't get nearly as out of kilter."

Goldberg also spoke about green issues, but from a slightly different perspective. He explained that as an industry, we have done a very poor job of taking credit for the things that we have historically done.

"The original reason a lot of those things started being done were because there were opportunities to save money at the same time you were doing the right thing for the environment ... but originally, they were designed because they were cost-effective," Goldberg said.

Because of that, said Goldberg, people may have been afraid to talk about these efficiencies, whether they were the use of compact fluorescent bulbs or replacing older PTAC units with newer, more efficient models.