IHG Spent 8 Years Rebuilding Its Hotel Systems. Now It Says the Payoff Is Starting.
Photo Credit: IHG CEO Elie Maalouf on-stage at NYU IHIF 2026. Questex
Skift Take
IHG CEO Elie Maalouf is telling franchisees that eight years of tech investment has begun to expand their margins. It's an open question whether this early tech advantage will woo more hotel owners, boosting the growth rate of IHG's system.
IHG spent eight years replacing its core technology systems. Now, its CEO says, the payoff is beginning to show up in franchisee margins.
Speaking in an exclusive Skift interview at the NYU IHIF conference this month, IHG CEO Elie Maalouf described an overhaul that most hotel companies are still attempting. It's fully deployed a reservation system built with Amadeus, an AI-driven revenue-management platform from Revenue Analytics, and most guest data in Google's cloud. New property-management systems will roll out to 4,000 hotels by year-end and eventually to all 7,000 hotels.
The result, Maalouf said, is that IHG can now do things at scale that were previously too costly, such as personalizing offers to the more than 160 million members of its loyalty program, surfacing relevant upgrades and add-ons during booking, and pricing rooms more preci
