Can Hotel Companies Have Too Many Brands?
Skift Take
We'd pay good money just to see hospitality executives try to guess which hotel brands belong to which companies.
Nobody can say that the hotel business suffers from a lack of brands — more than 1,000 are in operation, according to STR's most recent global list of chains. And they continue to multiply.
For most major hotel companies, there's no end in sight to the number of brands they can either dream up or acquire.
Marriott has 30. Wyndham has 20. Hilton has 14 and counting. AccorHotels has 24, not including soon-to-be-acquired Mövenpick Hotels, or luxury rental platform Onefinestay. InterContinental Hotels Group will have 14 once it adds Regent Hotels.
"There is no such thing as too many brands," Tina Edmundson, Marriott International's global brand officer and luxury portfolio leader said at the recent Skfit Forum Europe in Berlin. "It's like being too skinny or too rich."
Edmundson's thoughts on brands were later echoed by AccorHotels CEO Sebastien Bazin.
"Anyone telling me 'You should limit the number of brands,' I think, is bullshit," he said bluntly.
Bullshit or not, the debate about brand proliferation is something very much on the minds of the hospitality industry, not just for companies like Marriott or AccorHotels, but for one other very critical stakeholder: hotel owners.
Hotel owners, like Lightstone president Mitchell Hochberg, whose development company owns a number of branded hotels, often cite brand proliferation as one of their "biggest challenges."
Why? The more brands any one hotel company has, the higher risk of an individual hotel owner's business being hurt — not only from competitors' brands but from cannibalization within the same brand family.
Owners' concerns about brand proliferation aren't new to the hotel industry, but given the increasing consolidation that's taken place in the past four years, any trepidations owners already had have only been amplified.
And that's where hotel companies like Radisson Hotel Group, formerly known as Carlson Rezidor Hotel Group, see room for opportunity.
"Our pie may be smaller than the big guys, but we have a very compelling value proposition for an owner," Ken Greene, president of the Americas for Radisson Hotel Group said. "They don't have to worry about us bringing in another property in the same space."
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