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Cendant creates corp. hotel rates.

Article Excerpt
Cendant Hotel Group chairman and CEO Steven Rudnitsky last month met with BTN hotel editor Bruce Serlen to explain CHG's buyer initiatives, including its new pricing strategy for 2004 targeting the top hotels across nine midprice and economy brands.

BTN: What is the strategy behind the Corporate Select program?

Steven Rudnitsky: Corporate Select offers a fixed percentage off the rack rate at 2,300 of Cendant's 6,000-plus properties. It is a preferred corporate rate--rather than a negotiated rate--and is meant to provide rates across the board for large corporate customers that might have thousands of people traveling to a wide range of locations, using hundreds of hotels. With this program, buyers lock in a published rate for the year and then use the hotels at random.

BTN: Didn't the hotels already offer corporate rates, and don't you also promote negotiated rates?

Rudnitsky: Corporate rates weren't available in all cases. We're a franchise model, so we can't force load any rates. If buyers come to us and say, "We need these 60 locations across the country because we're putting volume into those areas and want a specially negotiated rate," we go and...