Brand Quest

What’s in a name?

When Shakespeare’s Juliet pondered this dilemma, she risked only the wrath of the Capulets. Now, however, Hawaii’s famous Aston hotel brand is facing the same question, and the risks seem much greater.

Starting on Aug. 1, Aston, a name that has rolled off the tongue of travel agents and their Hawaii-savvy clients for almost two decades, will cease to be. The moniker will be “retired,” as company executives like to say, from signs, advertisements, promotional brochures, name tags, shampoo bottles, pens and all other amenities. In its place will be “ResortQuest Hawaii.” The massive rebranding of Aston’s more than two dozen properties is intended to fully integrate Aston into ResortQuest International, the company it became part of in 1998, and to capitalize on the global platform and resources of that company and its parent, Gaylord Entertainment.

“The overall goal from the beginning when we went public in 1998 was to be able to capitalize on the synergies of each other,” said Aston president Kelvin Bloom. “It provides us the marketing horsepower that we would never even begin to match as a relatively small regional company. In Hawaii, we’re considered fairly large. But in the context of global brands — Hyatt, Hilton and so on — we’re not. This provides us with a company that has its local roots firmly planted in the aina (land) here, and it provides us with marketing resources. It’s the best of all worlds.”

The brand transition actually began nearly seven years ago. In 1998, fourteen vacation rental, property management and real estate sales companies, including Aston, joined to form a “roll up” company, one that links previously unrelated entities, and called it ResortQuest International. ResortQuest created a network with 20,000 hotels, condominiums and vacation rental units in 52 destinations in the United States and Canada.

The legal name of Aston Hotels & Resorts became ResortQuest Hawaii LLC, and it was referred to in advertisements and other branded items as Aston ResortQuest Hawaii, though other names — Aston Hawaii, Aston Hotels & Resorts — continued to float around. Alert agents may have noticed the ResortQuest brand name beneath or beside the Aston name for the last few years. Over time, “ResortQuest” has grown larger and moved to the forefront, Bloom said, as “Aston” grew smaller and dropped to the background.

The rebranding began in earnest in late 2003, however, when Gaylord Entertainment, the hospitality and entertainment giant perhaps best known for its Grand Ole Opry, purchased ResortQuest and put its branding expertise and financial resources behind the $2 million task. In fact, all of ResortQuest’s Mainland properties have already completed their brand transition. It is only Aston that has waited until now.

“The Aston brand has some equity and some history, and we wanted to make sure that migration was done in a very thoughtful manner,” Bloom said.

ResortQuest International president Mark Fioravanti added that Aston’s transition was timed to correspond to the wholesaler buying and pricing cycle.

Making the Change

So what will agents notice during the big push this summer? Other than the name, not much, Bloom said. Starting Aug. 1, advertisements will say “ResortQuest Hawaii, formerly Aston Hawaii,” but by the end of 2005, “Aston” will disappear entirely. Signs, in-room amenities and all other property related items will be switched directly to “ResortQuest Hawaii,” without the “formerly Aston Hawaii” cushion. That transition also will be completed by year’s end.

What will not change, Bloom said, are the practicalities of using an Aston property: booking procedures, phone numbers and Web sites all remain the same. Corporate headquarters remains in Honolulu, and all of the employees that agents are used to dealing with are still around. The STARs Online program, a loyalty program that gives agents who book with Aston points redeemable for goods or resort stays, will remain in place and possibly expand to the rest of the ResortQuest properties, Bloom said. Even the new signs that go up over properties will be subtle, he added, with the “Aston” slipping off and a discreet “ResortQuest” placed after or beneath the property’s name. Some may get a tag line that says “A ResortQuest Property.”

The company’s “signatures” — such as the “Aloha Book” guests find in their room that highlights little-known cultural attractions like Hawaii Plantation Villages on Oahu or Gay & Robinson Sugar Plantation Tours on Kauai, and Lei Day, when all employees bestow a lei on a guest of their choice — will remain in place as well. Also continuing will be the kids’ specials and other programs that utilize the “ASTONishing” tag, however the word ASTONishing will be changed to “Aloha” (for example, Aloha Kids, Aloha Deals, etc.). Finally, many individual properties have their own traditions, such as Thanksgiving potluck at Maui Hill and Breakfast on the Beach at the Aston Waikiki Beach Hotel, and those will also continue.

“When you check into our properties, it doesn’t have a generic, hectic hotel atmosphere,” said Joni Paahao, Aston’s senior vice president of sales, marketing and reservations. “It simply feels like your home in Hawaii. We will continue to keep this local spirit and sense of aloha.”

So why bother to do it? Because, Aston and ResortQuest executives said, it opens new avenues for both entities. Most of ResortQuest’s current business is customer direct, coming from the kind of people who cruise the Internet looking for accommodations. The majority of Aston’s revenue comes from its close ties with retail travel agents and wholesalers. By associating themselves in a single branded network, Bloom and Fioravanti said, Aston — and its agents — get access to a nationwide menu of properties and the customers who use them. ResortQuest gets an opportunity to piggyback on Aston’s strong relationship with agents and wholesalers.

“When brands introduce other brands, it’s like if a friend you trust introduces you to someone else and tells you this is a good person, and that’s a very powerful relationship,” Fioravanti said. “Ultimately as we begin to talk to Mainland consumers in our direct business about ResortQuest Hawaii, there’s that opportunity on the flip side for Aston.”

‘Clicks’ to ‘Bricks’

Aston is no stranger to being renamed. Until 1986, the properties in its mix were part of Hotel Corporation of the Pacific. Some savvy marketing led company founder and then-leader Andre Tatibouet to transform the company into the Aston Hotels & Resorts that agents know today.

“This is not rocket science,” Tatibouet said recently. “When you flip open the phone book you see ‘AAA’ whatever. So the best name to have is with an A. So that was easy. We wanted an A.”

Plus, he said, it had to be short: Long names are hard to say and fewer letters mean bigger letters on signs and in advertising. Focus groups said “Aston” had an upscale ring to it, Tatibouet said, maybe like the Aston Martin car. And finally, there was the power of association.

“At the time major brands were Sheraton, Hilton and Westin,” he said. “And what’s common to them is ‘-ton’ at the end. So you’ve got an ‘A’ and a ‘-ton.’”

Brand and marketing experts said the rebranding of a well-known player like Aston is a risky move, but one that is likely to pay off.

“Rebranding risks losing the brand equity of Aston which has been a significant player in the Hawaiian hotel market for a number of years with ResortQuest being a relative unknown,” said Dr. Chekitan Dev, an associate professor of marketing at Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration.

Another risk, he said, “is in taking ResortQuest from being a primarily ‘clicks’ brand to more of a ‘bricks’ brand by putting its name on the door.”

But becoming a bricks brand also gives ResortQuest greater credibility and may attract more management contracts, Dev said, while creating that stronger link with Aston gives them a higher profile in the hotel business. Aston gets the benefit of a national network, he said.

“On balance,” he said, “this was a smart move.”

Aston’s rebranding is big by industry standards because it involves the entire company, Dev said, not just an individual property or two. Aston’s Bloom said executives are deciding whether to keep two or three properties as “Aston” properties if they don’t fit the ResortQuest mix, but in the end nearly all of Aston’s 28 properties will be rebranded.

Dev drew parallels to when Marriott purchased Stouffer and rebranded the properties as Renaissance, and to Conrad Hilton’s purchase of the Statler Hotel Company for $111 million in 1954. The Aston rebrand is not on the same order of magnitude as the Hilton-Statler deal, but there are lessons to be taken from it.

One of the things Hilton did right, Dev said, was to retain the “Statler” name while it gradually transitioned to “Hilton,” much the way Aston has been transitioning to ResortQuest.

“Mr. Hilton realized that the Statler name had some equity, like Aston has some equity in Hawaii,” Dev said. “This is a logical step in the rebranding of these hotels to something new, that by now people understand it’s the same hotel. Typically they start off with the new name in smaller font and then it gets bigger and bigger.”

One potential drawback for Aston, however, could be that ResortQuest does not yet have a strong identity, some experts said, certainly not as strong as Aston’s. ResortQuest bills itself as the nation’s largest vacation rental and property management company, three times larger than its closest competitor. Company president Fioravanti said it unifies its properties through branding, service standards and a rating system that clients can rely on as an indicator of quality for properties that are often individually owned and therefore diverse. Soon, the properties will also be linked through central reservations technology.

But some experts said the brand is still too muddled, renting vacation homes, managing property, selling real estate and not cultivating any particular image.

“ResortQuest has yet to decide what they are,” said James Chung, president of Boston-based Reach Advisors, a strategy and research firm serving the resort industry. “These are individual properties with no overall brand theme or identity. What’s holding it together is a centralized database.”

As an example of successful branding of a small entity, Chung pointed to Kimpton Hotels, which took unrelated properties, many of them run down or in less desirable neighborhoods, and gave them all a similar urban-chic motif that would appeal to the 30-something road warrior on a smallish expense account.

“The difference there is that Kimpton decided who they are, who they wanted to be and who they wanted to attract, and they focused in a manner that their consumers could understand,” Chung said.

Spreading the Word

Reaching out to the trade to explain the rebranding — and to win its quick acceptance — will be crucial to its success, both branding experts and company officials said. Aston was scheduled to launch a newsletter this month called “Talk Story” that will keep agents and wholesalers updated on branding initiatives and will be distributed by sales managers on sales calls or at trade shows. By June, executives hope to have a version online.

In some ways the outreach and education also began years ago, with executives like Bloom and Fioravanti talking at length about ResortQuest when they spoke to large groups at events such as the ASTA World Congress. And many trade folks, who work with Aston on an almost daily basis, already seem well informed and upbeat about the change.

“Most of us still see Aston as Aston, and I am confident that Aston is going to manage this process properly,” said Dennis Odom, vice president of Albuquerque-based Blue Sky Tours. “I don’t claim to be a brand management expert, but I’ve seen them do it before and they did a good job of it. And I think by the end of the year everybody will know exactly who ResortQuest is. I’m confident they’ll pull it off.”

Blue Sky books only Hawaii, so it won’t necessarily benefit from being part of that larger, Mainland network, Odom said — unless it sends some traffic their way to the islands.

“If they build a brand on the Mainland — and they have some outstanding properties on the Mainland — it may be that people say ‘I liked it in Vail, so that’s where I want to go in Hawaii,’” he said.

Some agents see numerous positives.

“We’re going to miss the Aston name,” said Brent Mayes, president of All About Hawaii. But, he added, “As we sell Hawaii vacations from all 50 states, the ResortQuest name will only provide opportunities. The change initially is going to be hard. Not everyone liked the idea of changing Hotel Corporation of the Pacific to Aston. I can remember a lot of people being upset with that. People got used to it. And the brand grew stronger. Customers understood.”

Plus, Mayes said, ResortQuest has an active, vibrant sound to it, one that might better capture the new adventure traveler.

“ResortQuest implies action and activity to me,” he said. “It’s a good name. You could do worse.”