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Preferred Hotels and Resorts boss talks portfolio expansion and trade relationships

“The independent hotel network has expanded its UK sales team and launched an advisor platform”

InterviewsApr 15, 2025by Charlotte Brook

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Independent hotel collective Preferred Hotels & Resorts represents more than 600 hotels worldwide, including those from its high-end Legend and LVX Collections. After a strong year of portfolio expansion and revenue growth, Aspire sits down with president Michelle Woodley to find out more about new properties within the portfolio, the business’ sustainability effort and its plans for nurturing relationships with the travel trade.

Q. How was 2024 in terms of revenue growth and portfolio expansion?

Last year was our largest year of growth since 2019. We added 80 hotels to the portfolio, bringing our total to 600 hotels in 80 countries across all of our collections. Properties from hotel brands with a small portfolio represent about 40% [of our network], with the other 60% being independently owned and managed hotels. We had good revenue growth across the board mainly from occupancy last year, whereas the two prior years the main growth factor was [increased] average rate. In particular, we have a big focus on our Legend and LVX Collections, and in 2024 we achieved an 18.85% increase in reservations across both collections, compared with the previous year. We forged a new partnership with Virgin Limited Edition to bring all of the brand’s properties into the Legend Collection. We’ve also started with some great momentum coming into this year by adding four new properties in Europe: Armani Hotel Milano, Al Habtoor Palace Budapest, Das Edelweiss Salzburg Mountain Resort in Austria and Andronis Luxury Suites in Santorini, bringing the total number of Legend properties to 111.

Q. How do you bring in new hotels and which destinations are you looking to grow in?

For each collection, there is a slightly different criteria but we’re specific about the hotels that join our Legend Collection. A priority is service excellence, which we evaluate through inspection. We also hugely rely on our travel agent advisory group for an insider perspective, asking questions such as do they send clients there with confidence? Are issues resolved in a timely manner? We also look at cities where we have gaps. We have a lot of growth opportunities in Europe. In particular, the DACH region [Germany, Austria and Switzerland] is a focus for growing our Legend and LVX Collections.

Q. Which trends do you think will continue to be influential this year?

Travel patterns are continuing to shift into the shoulder seasons due to heat and overcrowding during the summer months, which is great for independent hotels as they used to have a limited booking window, but are now opening for longer. The event effect was also a huge trend last year, with people travelling for big music or sporting dates such as Taylor Swift concerts, the Olympics or the Euros. After seeing this excitement, more hotels and destinations are really getting creative by hosting pop-up events and creating experiences for guests with celebrity chefs or artists. We’ve also started to see a trend of travellers doing twin-centre stays at Preferred properties in town and country, which is exciting.

Q. Tell us more about the business’s sustainability efforts.

We launched our Beyond Green collection in 2021 to highlight properties that are true leaders in sustainability and focused on the core pillars of nature, community and culture. We have since grown the portfolio to more than 50 members and are focusing on developing the brand to bring city hotels into the fold. We hosted our first-ever Beyond Green Summit at Cavallo Point, one of our Legend Collection properties, in California in March. We also recently launched our Climate Action Plan, which is in line with the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals, to assess what we can do at a company level. We partnered with the Travel Foundation to do a baseline study on our carbon emissions and implement systems to help manage them. We’ve also started sessions to educate our teams on how to have an impact.

Q. How are you striving to strengthen relationships with the travel trade?

The trade has always been super important and the UK is a huge market for us, so we’ve grown our team to reflect this. We recently appointed Dan Clark as vice-president of global leisure sales for Europe to strengthen relationships with the travel agent community, drive bookings for member hotels worldwide and foster partnerships with luxury organisations such as Virtuoso and Serandipians. The group sales team now has two salespeople as well as two support team members. Our sales approach has evolved over the years too. We’re focused on connecting people through hosting experiences with advisors to have fun and learn from each other. Our measurement of success is still bookings but we’re thinking about how we motivate agents through listening to what they want. We have also launched our Travel Advisor Portal, which has received great feedback. In the first two weeks, 777 agents enrolled. We built it because our VIP desk was inundated with requests for information, quotes and commissions, so we thought let’s create a way for advisors to access all of that in one place and make bookings easier.