NEW YORK — Horace Greeley famously remarked in 1865: “Go West, young man.” One hundred sixty years later, Elie Maalouf, CEO of IHG Hotels & Resorts, would frame it differently: It’s the East where the action is.
Speaking at the Skift Global Forum, the chief of such brands as Holiday Inn, Candlewood Suites, Crowne Plaza and InterContinental, underscored the importance and vitality of markets in the U.S. and Europe, but most of the growth, he said, is moving East, into the Middle East, Southeast Asia, China—”a basin of 3 billion people that is growing fast, has a younger population, higher middle-class growth, more infrastructure development… it all conspires in a good way to turbo charge travel growth,” Maalouf said.
He drilled down deeper on Japan, a country, he said, whose hotels remain vastly under-branded from the perspective of international brands, with independents hotels and inns still dominating. That, he said, is changing. “Japan is incredibly developed, has an evolved economy and society, but the hotel industry has been very internal. It’s a huge opportunity.”
Japan recorded a record-breaking 36.9 million international visitors in 2024, surpassing the pre-pandemic peak of 2019 and representing a 47% increase from 2023. Maalouf said it’s on its way to 60 million and with that growth, he said, there needs to be changes to its hotel industry. “They’ve got great infrastructure, great culture, great heritage and incredible transportation network, but the hotel sector needs transformation,” he said, adding that only 5% of the country’s hotel stock is branded by international brands. However, he stressed, it has nothing to do with the quality of hotels that are there; rather, it’s about international tourist expectations. “The [hotels] are either independent or domestic brands, which are fine, but they’re not fine enough for all these international travelers coming,” he said.
Learning Lessons
One advantage IHG has is its heritage, especially in China, where IHG has some 800 hotels now and where Japan receives many a number of tourists from. It’s been noted that the first international hotel brand to enter Mainland China was Holiday Inn in 1984, with the Holiday Inn Lido in Beijing. “A lot of these international travels aren’t just coming from the U.S. or Europe, they’re coming from China and Korea, from Vietnam, from the Middle East, and the good news is they’re used to our brands,” he said. “We are seeing a transformation of the hotel stock in Japan from domestic brands to more international brands.” Hotels in the IHG system in Japan have the highest fee per room, Maalouf said.
In February, IHG surpassed 50 hotels in Japan and Maalouf said it remains on track to double its stock of hotels there over the next two years.
It’s a similar growth story for IHG in India, where it opened its 50th hotel in May and has another 70 in the pipeline. Maalouf called the development trajectory there different than Japan—slower—but likened it to the rate of its growth story in China. He cited population and economics: India has a population of 1.4 billion, but GDP per household in India is one quarter of what it is in China, Maalouf noted. “It’s big business, but it’s going to move in a different trajectory,” he said.
Worldwide, IHG now has 6,730 open in more than 100 countries with another 2,300 in development. “Being just the biggest to be the biggest is not our objective,” Maalouf said. “Our objective is to build a global hospitality company in the geographies that we select and in the segments that we select, from midscale to ultra luxury.” (Though some of IHG’s competitors have launched brands in the economy spaces, Maalouf said they are not interested in that.) Holiday Inn is one of the most iconic brands in the world, and Maalouf argued that Holiday Inn Express, which launched in 1990 as a limited-service appendix of Holiday Inn, is one of the greatest brand extensions of all-time, right on par with Diet Coke. There are currently 3,500 Holiday Inn Express hotels worldwide and according to HOTELS Magazine’s 2025 “The List” survey has the second-highest number of the rooms in the world at close to 344,000. “It was genius and produced a ton of shareholder value for our company,” Maalouf said.
Holiday Inn Express was created by IHG. Ruby Hotels was not, but was acquired by IHG earlier this year for upwards of $300 million. Ruby was founded in 2013 and currently has 20 hotels, most in Germany. IHG expects as many as 10 more Ruby properties to open by the end of 2027 with the pipeline still skewing toward Europe. But Maalouf said scaling the brand means developing hotels in the U.S., something he said would come soon. The brand is premium, but not luxury, stripped down and design-led with smaller rooms and lack of large meeting room space and F&B. “We’re going to bring it to the U.S. by the end of the year for franchising, then we’re going to take it East,” he said, staying on message.
Maalouf said IHG hotels and the greater hospitality industry will continue to benefit from what he called the “silver economy,” the wave of people slowing down or retiring and healthier and wealthier than any previous generation. “They have homes, they have shoes, they have cars and bikes and toys. Now, they just want to experience and no amount of artificial anything can substitute live experiences,” Maalouf said. “We’re in the live-experience business. It is a secular trend that is going to continue.”