CHINA The world’s largest hotel company expects that China will become its largest hotel market within 15 years.
IHG believes China will overtake the United States for the title of world’s largest hotel market in 2025 and become twice the size of the current U.S. market by 2039. The next 20 years will see almost an eightfold increase in IHG’s guestrooms in Greater China. This means the company will offer about 360,000 guestrooms and its hotel owners will employ 325,000 people—currently total number of IHG employees worldwide—in China alone.
IHG anticipates “an era of unprecedented opportunity and sustained growth” for the company as it responds to favorable socioeconomic trends in high-priority markets, namely China, India and the Middle East. Rapidly growing and shifting populations, heavy investment in infrastructure and significant GDP growth in those regions are prompting unprecedented increases in domestic and international leisure and business travel. This is in turn increasing demand for hotel accommodation, especially for larger branded players, which are expected to outstrip demand for non-branded hotels by a factor of three.
The Middle East’s GDP is outpacing the rest of the world and offers superb RevPAR opportunities, IHG says. IHG aims to open 38 new hotels across the region in the next four to five years.
In India, IHG aims to treble its size in next three years, opening 150 new hotels by 2020.
“Hotel companies need to anticipate trends at least 10 to 20 years ahead, and we know the world is going to be on the move like never before,” says IHG CEO Andy Cosslett. “The economic empowerment of developing countries and massive growth in business and leisure travel mean we will aim for sustained growth in what could be an era of unprecedented opportunity and sustained growth for the hotel industry.”