Can Hotel Companies Have Too Many Brands?
Photo Credit: Marriott International global brand officer and luxury portfolio leader Tina Edmundson spoke about the value of brands at the recent Skift Forum Europe in Berlin. Skift / Tim Keweritsch
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,
