Skift Take
As anyone in media knows right now, scale is not always the solution and confidence in what you do well is rarely a bad idea. Hyatt's rethink of both loyalty beyond points and branding beyond the nightly stay will help it differentiate its product.
Hyatt Hotels Corporation is not the biggest hotel chain.
At 611 hotel properties and 162,336 rooms, Hyatt is no Marriott (with Starwood: 1.1 million rooms, 5,500 hotel properties, and 30 brands), InterContinental Hotels Group (750,000 rooms, 4,500 properties, and 10 brands), Wyndham Worldwide (678,000 rooms, 7,800 properties, and 16 brands), or even Hilton Worldwide (750,000 rooms, 4,500 properties, and 11 brands).
It's a mini-major, a big boutique, or something in between. Or as CEO Mark Hoplamazian told attendees of last fall's Skift Global Forum, it's a bit of humanity mixed with empathy, that happens to sell some high-end hotel rooms. It also doesn't do bad financially. Along with quarterly reports that reveal solid earnings, if you divide Hyatt's market cap by number of rooms, it beats out every competitor by more than $10,000 a room, including Airbnb and HomeAway, too.
That's not to say it likely wouldn't mind getting bigger. Beyond ambitious projects like its new New York City flagship Park Hyatt property, and its latest brand the Unbound Collection, Hyatt is experimenting with size. Although in October reports had Hyatt as a leader in the Starwood acquisition game, that failed to materialize. On one hand Starwood was the right buy: It shared the same class of higher-end travelers, as well as a similar weakness in the budget and select-service categories, which investors keep saying they want a hotel brand to have.
Nevertheless, Hyatt continues on with its 12 brands (all eponymous, except for Andaz) and singular focus on its own brand of service and loyalty.
Skift spoke with Hyatt CEO Hoplamazian at the WTTC Global Summit in Dallas last week, the day before the Marriott and Starwood shareholders' votes. We started with the obvious elephant in the room: Size.
Skift: The focus for a lot of people in hospitality lately has been size: What's IHG going to buy to get bigger, what's Accor going to buy to get bigger, what's Marriott going to buy to get bigger? Why the focus now on size?
Mark Hoplamazian: It's a good question. You know, frankly, I'm a bit perplexed by what feels like a very automatic response right now, which is the knee-jerk reaction that bigger's better. Therefore, what's getting reported is a hyperfocus on size being the be-all to end all. There are certain elements of our industry that benefit from increased size, and there are others which are detrimented by it, where there are dis-economies of scale. I think i
