Hyatt Plots Doubling Of UK Hotels As Lifestyle And Data Fuel Growth
Global hotel giant Hyatt Hotels is looking to significantly increase the number of hotels that operate under its brands in the UK over the next few years, part of a wider European expansion, with lifestyle assets to the fore.
Hyatt has beefed up its European development team over the past few months, led by Felicity Black-Roberts, its senior vice president of development for Europe, Africa and the Middle East.
The hotel chain is looking to work with best-in-class operators and property owners to expand its footprint in a market that it sees as benefiting from increasing leisure and business travel.
“We have 16 hotels in the UK, and we should have double or triple that, given the size of Hyatt globally,” Black-Roberts told Bisnow.
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In London, Hyatt has just opened the 203-room, 31-suite Park Hyatt River Thames in Nine Elms under its top-tier Park Hyatt brand. Other well-known properties include the Andaz London Liverpool Street, the only hotel in the City of London for almost a century until the 1980s, and the Hyatt Regency London - The Churchill on Portman Square in the West End.
In the next 18 months, it is opening five new hotels across the UK: Hyatt House Leeds and Hyatt Place Leeds in March 2025, Hyatt Regency London Olympia in early 2026, Hyatt Centric Haymarket Edinburgh in late 2026, and Hyatt Place London Paddington in late 2026.
Black-Roberts’ team expanded in 2024 to allow it to source and execute more deals with property owners and operators in Europe. It is now 10 strong, including four additions in 2024, with a 50-50 male-female split.
“We’ve been a small team, and this gives us legs on the ground as we look to diversify outside of London and other gateway cities,” Black-Roberts said.
The company, which has a market capitalisation of $15B (£12B), manages and franchises more than 1,300 hotels and all-inclusive resorts across the world. Like most big hotel companies, it is looking to expand via an “asset-light” strategy, working with operators and owners rather than owning buildings itself.
That effort is being aided by the rise of increasingly sophisticated specialist hotel operating companies, Black-Roberts said, citing European firms like Cycas, Aimbridge and SV Group.
Once upon a time, the company wouldn’t have trusted a specialist operator to run one of its more upscale brands, such as Hyatt Regency, but the quality of operators made that increasingly possible, meaning such marques can expand more easily.
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The use of data also facilitates what Black-Roberts calls the firm’s strategy of “growing with intent.” The data Hyatt collects can be fed back to operators to allow them to improve their processes and thus the revenue that a given hotel collects.
“We know that hotels with a better clean bedroom score achieve [revenue per available room] above those with less clean rooms,” Black-Roberts said.
“If the operator doesn’t know their stuff, they won’t know why RevPAR is so low. And we can dive further into the data and find out if that low score might be coming from just two or three rooms. We can work with our franchisee to allow their general managers to deliver.”
Black-Roberts said elevated construction and financing costs are stymieing the development of new hotels and hindering the ability to expand into brand-new assets, barring the odd exception where a hotel is part of a wider regeneration project.
On the other hand, more opportunities to take over struggling existing hotels are emerging as the market bifurcates between better-quality assets and the rest. Rival firms that might have signed up to overly optimistic revenue projections to win the right to put their brands into hotels are now feeling the heat, she said. That offers the opportunity to work with owners and operators to convert existing assets to Hyatt brands.
Hyatt sees particular opportunity in the lifestyle sector, and it has created a dedicated lifestyle hotel division for the first time. Last year, it paid an initial $150M for the trendy Standard hotel brand, a figure that will rise to as much as $335M as more hotels in the brand’s portfolio come online.
In terms of other European locations where the company wants to expand, Black-Roberts cited Scandinavia, a region where it sees strong growth. It is also eyeing Italy, where the opportunity comes from the low level of branded hotels — travellers like the certainty of service and quality that brands like Hyatt offer, she said.
“We’re not as big as a lot of our competitors,” Black-Roberts said. “We want to grow with purpose and intent.”