3 ms·

Remember when you are looking at hotel chain valuations that they generally don't own the hotels, but just franchise the brand. There are other large companies

• atwebb 12y ago
  While that can be true, some get a fair amount of money out of their owned (or ones they actively manage) properties. Franchisees are quite important and contribute a lot in fees (lots of fees...) as you point out but don't discount the still owned properties, many of which are significant buildings by themselves.
• rokhayakebe 12y ago
  Expand, please.
  • smackfu 12y ago
    The hotel business has the separate concepts of "operator" and "owner". The operator is the brand you know. The owner is some property ownership company that contracted a particular operator to build and run their property. The branding is so thorough that you generally don't see any indication of the actual owner, except in the rare cases where a property changes brands. Just take a look at this list of the top 25 hotel owners: http://nreionline.com/research/real_estate_top_hotel_owners_0701 http://nreionline.com/research/real_estate_top_hotel_owners_... A few are the brands themselves, since they are the owner/operator for some properties. But many are companies you have never heard of that own hundreds of hotels.
    • rokhayakebe 12y ago
      Interesting, I only heard of 1 of out of those companies previously.