Ascend Hotel Collection

Designed for travellers seeking unique experiences in exceptional surroundings, the upscale Ascend Hotels Collection is a membership of independent hotels with unique properties and signature styles.

Classed as a ‘soft brand’, this range gives operators the freedom to retain their individual personality while extending their reach through Choice Hotel’s extensive distribution network, opening doors to a expanding and global market of leisure, corporate and experience-seeking travellers alike. Embracing historic inns, boutique properties, luxury retreats and chic city hotels, the Ascend Hotel Collection now represents the largest soft brand in the world, connecting with travellers’ unique tastes and an ongoing expansion of market opportunities.

Ascend Highlights

First and largest global soft brand in the industry
Owners get to keep operational and design freedom
Gives owners the ability to take advantage of Choice Privileges, the award winning loyalty program of Choice Hotels
Allows access to booking engines and training support provided by Choice Hotels

We wanted to tell a little bit of our own story. The Ascend Collection is exactly that - it allows us to tell our own story while still be part of a larger collective of hotels around Australia, and indeed around the world. Choice Hotels assists us to be the best that we can be by maximising our revenues and getting people into the hotel - and we’re very confident that once that’s happened they’ll stay with us.

We joined Choice under the Ascend Collection brand to maintain our individual identity in the brand that we’d built, with a greater distribution and lower distribution fees. But we also got a support network across the Choice family, with experienced operators that we could share unique experiences with. Not feeling like we were going it alone was really important to us.

We joined Choice Hotels in 2013 and essentially it was to generate bookings for our hotel. We operate a heritage property built in 1927 in the Sydney CBD, with 83 rooms, and occupancy was travelling at around 63%. Once I came on board in 2015, and working with Choice over the next couple of years, we accelerated that to 84% occupancy.

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