Dive Brief:
- Choice Hotels International’s midscale extended stay brand Everhome Suites opened a 114-room hotel in Lexington, Kentucky, the hotel company announced Tuesday.
- The opening of Everhome Suites Lexington North comes just days after Choice broke ground on three Everhome hotels on the East Coast in New Hampshire, New York and New Jersey.
- Choice plans to continue investing in the competitive extended stay segment — particularly in its Everhome Suites brand, which has dozens of hotels in its construction pipeline — to “lead and innovate from the front in the highest opportunity categories,” according to Matt McElhare, Choice’s lead for extended stay brands.
Dive Insight:
With Everhome Suites Lexington North, the extended stay brand has four open hotels. The property comes one month after Choice opened an Everhome hotel in Nampa, Idaho, debuting the brand standard prototype.
There are another 20 Everhome hotels currently under construction and 60 in the development pipeline, Choice Hotels detailed in a Tuesday release.
Last week, the company broke ground on three properties under the brand: a 106-room hotel in Portsmouth, New Hampshire; a 114-key property in Somerset, New Jersey; and a 114-room hotel in Rochester, New York. All three hotels are being developed in collaboration with Highside Companies.
Choice anticipates more than 10 Everhome hotels will open within the next year.
The company is growing Everhome alongside its other three extended stay brands, WoodSpring Suites, MainStay Suites and Suburban Studios.
As of the first quarter of this year, Choice had more than 400 properties in its pipeline across its four extended stay brands. The company’s domestic extended stay hotel portfolio grew 17.4% year over year in the quarter, according to Choice.
Choice is among other industry players making a strategic push in extended stay. Hyatt is expanding its upper midscale Hyatt Studios brand, Hilton is growing its lower midscale LivSmart brand and Marriott International is getting its midscale StudioRes brand off the ground.
Wyndham Hotels & Resorts, the peer Choice failed to acquire earlier this year, recently entered the upscale extended stay segment through a strategic partnership with WaterWalk.
Extended stay dominated the total U.S. hotel construction pipeline in the first quarter of this year, according to Lodging Econometrics.
Choice is also making a concerted push in upscale with the relaunch of its Radisson and Radisson Blu brands, announced last week.
