Hilton fights back after last quarter's strong performance from budget brands.

Whilst Premier Inn’s catchy television adverts helped keep them at the top spot for advertising recall, the budget brand also enjoyed the top spot for business and leisure traveller usage. Meanwhile, Hilton clawed its way back up the leader boards for brand awareness and leading choice scores from business and leisure travellers.

Budget brands as a whole faired best for advertising recall this quarter. Premier Inn achieved the highest recall – 43% for business travellers and 45% for leisure travellers – a 9 and 10% lead on their competitors which is an increase on the last quarter. Travelodge, Hilton and Holiday Inn received subsequent places.

For both sets of travellers, the largest level of recall by far was for Premier Inn’s televised advert, compared with other advertising components used by the brand and compared with recall for competitors’ TV adverts.

Hilton did, however, regain overall lead of prompted and unaided awareness of their brand.

Though this is welcome news for Hilton, actual awareness figures were not reflected so closely in usage figures. Premier Inn registered as receiving almost one third of the market share of business travellers this quarter. Holiday Inn and Hilton were the next used brands by business travellers.

Historically Hilton has been the leading choice brand by far for business travellers. Though still the leading choice this quarter, we are seeing a lessening of the gap between Hilton and the other competing brands. The gap more than halved between Hilton and Premier Inn since the last quarter.

In terms of actual leisure traveller usage of the top brands, Hilton achieved a better percentage of leisure guests this quarter. However, Hilton still came 4th after Travelodge, Premier Inn and Holiday Inn.

Hilton and Premier Inn jointly won the title of the leading choice brand for leisure travellers.