A few days ago I wrote about how Hyatt had expressed interest in a possible acquisition of NH Hotels.
Hyatt has been struggling to keep up with the competition when it comes to their global portfolio. While other major hotel brands have been expanding and acquiring competitors, Hyatt has been growing at a slow pace and hasn’t acquired any other hotel brands in recent years.
NH Hotels has about 380 hotels in 29 countries, with over 53,000 hotel rooms. Their biggest focus is in Europe and Latin America, which are areas where Hyatt has historically been pretty weak. So even though many NH Hotels don’t look that great, the two brands would have complemented one another nicely geographically.
While Hyatt had formally expressed interest, unfortunately it looks like Hyatt won’t be following through on this. Hyatt has already announced that they won’t be pursuing a takeover of NH Hotels, just days after expressing interest. Why? Because Thai hospitality company Minor controls 44% of the Spanish hotel operator, which Hyatt thinks will make a takeover “extremely challenging” under current market conditions.
While I wasn’t that excited about NH Hotels as such, I was excited at the possibility of Hyatt’s portfolio growing by 50% overnight.
The good news is that Hyatt isn’t completely left without options to grow. Radisson is owned by struggling HNA Group, which may be looking to sell their investment, given the financial situation they’re in. Surely this presents an opportunity for Hyatt, especially given Radisson’s strength in Europe.
Radisson has nearly 1,000 hotels in 73 countries, so this would more than double Hyatt’s global portfolio of hotels. Unfortunately I have a hard time getting too excited about this, though. While many Radisson Blu hotels are quite nice, Radisson’s lower end hotels aren’t all that exciting to me, personally.
While Hyatt hasn’t formally expressed interest in Radisson, I’d be surprised if they don’t do so soon.
Now that Hyatt has withdrawn interest in NH Hotels, do you think interest in Radisson is next?
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