Theme 5: Is it time for brand owners to shift from ‘asset light’ to ‘investment right’?
Over the past decade, global hotel brand owners have pursued an aggressive growth strategy. The average size of brand portfolios across Accor, Hilton, Hyatt, IHG and Marriott has expanded around 2.5x from 13 brands in 2015 to 35 today. Of the almost 160 brands now owned by these groups, one-third have fewer than 20 open hotels, and over 100 brands have fewer than 100 open hotels. The business model of the biggest players has shifted from a historical focus on individual brands to loyalty programmes and control over distribution.
At their most effective, leading loyalty schemes now deliver up to 70% of hotel revenues, underscoring the scale, resilience and commercial power of these platforms. There is no question that the major brand groups have built formidable enterprises.
However, the pace and breadth of brand proliferation raises important questions. Do all these brands genuinely resonate with consumers, or has growth begun to outpace clarity? As brand families expand, differentiation risks becoming diluted, and not all the hotel brands in a portfolio necessarily command equal attention or relevance. Is this good for hotel owners and guests?
At the same time, the development environment has become more challenging. Construction costs have increased 1.5–2x over the same ten-year period, raising barriers to entry and eroding development feasibility.
To bridge this gap, key money has become increasingly prevalent, rising threefold over the past decade at one major brand that discloses this data, and now forming a near-standard component of many development and conversion discussions.
This raises a more strategic question: could this capital have been deployed differently? The sums involved are meaningful – $1.2 billion in 2025 based on company reports from Accor, Hilton, Hyatt, IHG, and Marriott. This would have been sufficient to seed dedicated investment vehicles or platforms capable of attracting third-party capital. To date, this has not been the preferred growth model, and the industry has instead continued with its asset-light approach. Yet as market conditions become more complex and capital more selective, there is a growing case for evolution.
This brings us back to the theme of creativity. Rather than purely “asset light”, the next phase of growth may be better framed as “investment right”. There is an opportunity for the largest and most sophisticated brand owners to forge deeper, more aligned partnerships with long-term investors – using selective capital participation, co-investment or platform-level structures to unlock growth, reduce friction and better align incentives across the value chain.
