Back on solid financial footing, Red Roof Inn is poised for growth, particularly through franchised conversions. Top targets for the Columbus, OH-based economy chain are the Northeast, the West and Canada. In recent months, the company hired new development executives for each of those regions.

“Red Roof has primarily been an east-of-the-Mississippi brand so we have a lot of room to expand out west,” says Andrew Alexander, who last month was named president of the company after serving in an interim capacity. “Las Vegas and New Orleans are the two cities most requested by our customers where we don’t have properties. Naturally, we’re looking very intently in those markets.”

Canada is a new territory for Red Roof, although as Alexander says, many Canadians are familiar with the product because of its distribution in border cities such as Buffalo and Detroit. The key is to find the right partner for growth up north. What Alexander says he doesn’t want to do is partner with a master franchisee that may be “selling eight different brands and won’t really be focused on us.”

That philosophy for Canada is in sync with Red Roof’s “one-brand, one-focus” business model. “Our total effort is on our Red Roof franchisees,” says Alexander. “We’re not putting competing properties next to them and we’re not spending time upbranding or downbranding them. We’re focused on making them succeed as Red Roof Inns. Unlike at some other hotel companies, Red Roof isn’t a throwaway brand in a pyramid of brands.”

Despite the emphasis on franchising, the company still owns and operates about 200 of the chain’s nearly 350 properties, which Alexander views as a positive for current and future franchisees. He believes since the company has skin in the game, it doesn’t make hasty decisions about the brand without considering the costs involved for both company-owned and franchised properties.

“And because we’re also operators, we can provide our franchisees with the operational support and guidance they need to succeed,” he says. “The brand’s operations manual wasn’t drafted 20 years ago; we update it every year.”

As Red Roof hopes to add 40 or more franchised properties a year, it sees a large pool of aging mid-market properties ripe for conversion to the brand. Prime targets, says Alexander, are 15-year-old Fairfield Inn, Holiday Inn Express and Hampton Inn properties that are reaching the end of their useful lives with their current brands and need places to land.

Since introducing it several years ago, the brand has been slowly rolling out its NextGen product to new and existing properties. The room package, which first showed up in new-build properties two years ago, includes wood floors, flat-screen TVs, improved lighting and spa-like showerheads. Alexander concedes that a chain-wide rollout will take awhile: existing franchisees will adopt the changes as they make scheduled renovations and, similarly, conversions to the brand will be given ample time to upgrade to the next standards.

“We somewhat flexible about the project,” he says. “We want to make sure our customers have clean and comfortable experiences, so it’s not as important that the headboard in the rooms be exactly what we say it should be. It’s not what our customers worry about. They want consistency, good value and good quality.”

While Alexander says the franchised side of Red Roof wasn’t encumbered by the company’s recent financial issues, the business has been idling in neutral in the past few years. That seemingly changed late last year as its parent company, a partnership between Westmont Hospitality and Citigroup, reached a deal with its lenders on $754 million of past-due mortgages. The settlement calls for Red Roof to relinquish ownership of many of its properties but continue to manage them.