Choice Hotels Interim CEO Targets RevPAR Gap via CX Strategy

What happened

Choice Hotels International has a new interim chief executive, Dom Dragisich, who is roughly eleven weeks into the role and has made closing a persistent revenue-per-available-room gap with competitors his stated priority. The company's franchise estate is expanding — room count is growing again — yet that headline growth has not translated into equivalent revenue performance relative to peers, and Dragisich is now making the case, publicly, that he has a credible path to parity.

The appointment is interim in title, which itself signals that the board is still evaluating its longer-term leadership options even as the business requires immediate strategic direction. Dragisich's pitch centres on the revenue side of the ledger: the challenge is not simply adding keys but extracting more value from the guests who walk through existing doors.

Why it matters

For customer-experience and service-design practitioners, the Choice Hotels situation is a useful live case study in the difference between scale and yield. A franchise model can grow its footprint efficiently, but footprint alone does not close a revenue gap — that requires guests to choose your properties over alternatives, pay more willingly, and return. Those outcomes are driven by perceived value, loyalty programme strength, and the consistency of the on-property experience across hundreds of independently operated franchisees. When a CEO names revenue parity as the primary objective, the underlying levers are almost always experiential: booking conversion, ancillary spend, repeat visitation and net promoter dynamics.

From a behavioural economics perspective, the gap between room growth and revenue growth also points to a potential anchoring problem. If guests have anchored Choice Hotels brands to a particular price-value position — economy and midscale — shifting that perception requires deliberate, sustained signal changes across the customer journey, not just a new commercial strategy at head office. That is a slow, difficult behavioural shift to engineer through a franchise network where brand standards are harder to enforce than in a directly managed estate.

The Renascence take

The instinct in turnaround situations like this is to reach for revenue-management tools — dynamic pricing, distribution channel optimisation, loyalty point resets. Those are necessary but insufficient. The deeper issue is that guests make lodging choices on the basis of anticipated experience, and if the brand's experience promise is fuzzy or inconsistent, no yield-management system closes the gap sustainably.

What most observers will miss is that the revenue gap is a symptom, not the disease — the disease is an experience perception gap. Dragisich's real task is to give millions of franchise guests a reason to prefer and pay more, which means investing in the moments that form and reinforce brand associations: the booking interaction, the arrival, the loyalty recognition. A customer-obsessed operator in his position would map the franchise guest journey end-to-end, identify the three or four moments where competitor brands are consistently outperforming on emotional resonance, and make closing those moments — not just the RevPAR spreadsheet — the visible internal rallying point. Revenue follows experience; rarely the other way around.