Hilton’s Hampton Inn Leads in Revenue for Brands: Top Stories in Hotels

Here are five top stories from the Daily Lodging Report newsletter in the past week. Get news on hotel deals, development, stocks, and career moves. Sign up here now.

“Hampton Inn by Hilton” on Top

The 2023 Big Book of Travel Data reported that Marriott is the top-ranked among 10 leading hotel groups globally, with $61.4 billion in system-wide room revenue. Hilton was second, with $41.5 billion.

Regarding individual brands, the Big Book said Hampton by Hilton led in 2022 with nearly $10.22 billion in room revenue, followed by Hilton Hotels & Resorts, with $9.24 billion, and Marriott‘s namesake brand, with $8.78 billion. The report was from Allianz and IdeaWorksCompany.

New Junk Fee: Checkouts for Elite Guests

The Wall Street Journal this week highlighted a new problem: More and more hotels are charging for early or late checkouts, impacting both regular guests and loyalty program elites.

“We can understand charging non-loyalty or even business customers,” wrote Alan Woinski, of Skift’s Daily Lodging Report. “Still, it seems to go against being elite when some of the members of the top tiers of the loyalty programs that have been accustomed to late checkouts are now seeing charges for it.”

Debate Over Hotel Lodging Supply Growth

Is the pace of hotel supply growth slowing, and if so, by how much? At issue is the impact of the sluggish transaction environment year-to-date.

On the relatively bullish side: Truist‘s research team held a conference call with JP Ford of Lodging Econometrics. They see steady growth in supply in the U.S. through 2025. LE said the U.S. supply is expected to grow 1.4% in 2023, 1.4% in 2024, and 1.5% in 2025. That would be keeping pace roughly with the sector’s recent long-term average.

On the bearish side: CBRE Hotels forecasted that hotel supply will increase at a 1% compound annual growth rate over the next five years, below the industry’s 1.6% long-term historical average. 

Individual players give mixed signals. The big takeaway from Service Properties Trust’s conference call was that they may be done buying hotels for the rest of the year. The real estate investment trust bought the Nautilus Hotel in South Beach, Miami, in the second quarter. But on the call, they described the transaction market as drying up and that they don’t believe buying hotels is the best use of capital at the moment.

Yet Bloomberg reported on the boom in hotel investment in Japan. Foreign investors, including Goldman Sachs Group, KKR & Co, and Blackstone, have spent a combined $2 billion on hotel deals in Japan so far this year, the most compared with any other sector in Asian commercial property, according to MSCI Real Assets. The total for all of 2022 was $1.4 billion. The rebound in the hotel business in Japan, plus the weak yen, is driving interest.

The Latest in Climate Friendly Hotels

Urban Villages celebrated the topping out of Populus, a new 265-room, 13-story hotel in downtown Denver, Colorado, aiming to be the first “carbon-positive” hotel in the United States (meaning, a guest stay supposedly reduces carbon released into the atmosphere thanks to offsets and other measures). The hotel, expected to open in spring 2024, will have a rooftop restaurant and bar as well as retail and event space, said the Denver Business Journal.

Betting on China

Hilton plans to open more than 730 properties in mainland China in the next decade, according to the South China Morning Post.

Hilton is betting on surging demand from the nation’s middle class. It opened 100 properties last year. Hilton’s occupancy rate for these hotels and resorts in the Asia Pacific region in the second quarter of 2023 was 69.9% — with revenue per available room up 79% year on year. For context, read: U.S. Hotel Groups Have Bet Big on China. Now They Have New Risks.