A few days ago I copied a chart from the InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG) website showing the number of hotels and rooms for each of the major 10 global hotel corporations. [Loyalty Traveler note: the pdf on the IHG website appears to have changed in the past week and the chart showing the 10 major hotel loyalty programs now only has five programs. I have used numbers from the earlier version of this file.] Looking at the chart my thoughts for the frequent guest member is the number of rooms available for room redemption in the program is a competitive advantage of a hotel loyalty program. One of the main points of the hotel loyalty program for the consumer is the opportunity to get a free room stay.
And for the loyal consumer there is the probability that a larger hotel in terms of rooms is likely to have more room categories. More types of rooms gives a room upgrade advantage to the elite frequent guest member.
IHG claims it is the largest global operator of hotels by number of rooms. Showing a third piece of data shows Starwood Hotels has on average the most rooms per hotel of the major chains.
Hotel Chain Number of hotels Number of rooms #rooms/#hotels
IHG 3,949 hotels 585,094 rooms = 148
Wyndham Worldwide 6,544 hotels 550,576 rooms = 84
Marriott International 2,901 hotels 517,909 rooms = 179
Hilton Hotels 2,959 hotels 497,365 rooms = 168
Accor 3,857 hotels 459,494 rooms = 119
Choice International 5,516 hotels 445,254 rooms = 81
Best Western 4,035 hotels 308,636 rooms = 76
Starwood Hotels 897 hotels 274,535 rooms = 306
Carlson Hospitality 971 hotels 148,551 rooms = 153
Global Hyatt 720 hotels 138,503 rooms = 192
TOTAL 32,349 hotels 3,925,917 rooms = 121
Source: MKG Hospitality as of Jan 2008
(Hyatt sold Hawthorne Suites brand in 2008 after this data was produced in January 2008 and now has fewer hotels and rooms than shown here.) [update 8-15-08: IHG released first half 2008 company figures showing 4,046 hotels and 598,165 rooms at end of June 2008.]
The interesting feature of the chart on the IHG site is seeing the average size of hotels when dividing the number of rooms in the hotel chain by the number of hotels in the hotel chain. Starwood, on average, has a much higher average number of rooms per hotel than the other hotel chains. This could simply be the effect of Marriott, IHG, and Hilton each having numerous hotels in their family and the large number of smaller mid-scale properties bring the average number down.
Is there any correlation between getting an upgrade and the size of the hotel?
Is there a correlation between getting a free room using hotel points and the average size of the hotel in terms of number of rooms for the hotel chain?
These are interesting questions to consider, but unfortunately, I don’t have the answers.
