Choice Hotels International will waive franchise royalty fees for three years for new Comfort Inn and Comfort Suites hotels.
Choice said it is offering the deal to developers who commit to building new Comfort properties with the most recent design prototype.
The fee waiver is another effort by Choice to boost the Comfort brand. The company last year started funding $40 million in improvements, saying that it would contribute as much as 50% of the costs for hotel upgrades completed by the end of September 2014.
The funding was in the form of a loan whose promissory note would be forgiven if the improvement standards and deadlines were met.
Choice CEO Stephen Joyce said in early 2012 that he expected about 70% of the Comfort-branded properties to receive improvements by 2015, and estimated that a typical 75-room Comfort Inn would require "about a couple hundred thousand dollars" to meet the new standards.
Choice franchises almost 1,900 Comfort Inn and Comfort Suites hotels.
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