IHG CEO Banks on Newer Hotel Brands to Drive Profit Momentum
Photo Credit: Newer brands like Voco (pictured: Voco Thousand Island Lake in China) are a rapidly increasing part of IHG's future expansion plans. IHG Hotels & Resorts
Skift Take
Holiday Inn Express is still the bread and butter at IHG, but newer brands like Avid and Voco are vaulting up the charts to account more for future expansion at the company.
A vital part of IHG’s strategy to return to high levels of growth rests on brands that only came into the company’s network within the last five years.
IHG returned to profitability last year while it eliminated 151 underperforming Holiday Inn and Crowne Plaza hotels. But investors want to see the company return to expansion mode after several quarters of essentially no growth — and a slight 0.6 percent system-wide shrinkage last year — to its guest room count.
Company leaders on an investor call Tuesday indicated a strategy to return to the nearly 5 percent growth seen in 2018 — an IHG benchmark year since, at the time, it was the highest pace of expansion seen at the company in a decade.
The Holiday Inn network, which includes Holiday Inn Express, will continue to drive much of IHG’s expansion. But newer brands are also playing a part in getting back to 2018 growth levels.
“The Holiday Inn brand families are a core driver. Avid is the second one, and then it's a balanced approach across luxury and lifestyle and upscale,” IHG CEO Keith Barr said in an interview with Skift following this week’s earnings call.
Avid, IHG’s affordably priced mid-
