Hyatt CCO Says Lifestyle Brands, Well-Being Focus And Loyalty Program Fueling 2023 Growth

06.08.2023 - 12:31 / forbes.com

Hyatt Hotels Corporation is on the fast track to growing its brand, its property portfolio and its loyalty partnerships. While not the biggest hospitality company, it is laser-focused on being the best by expanding its geography and listening to customers. Even during the tough pandemic era, Hyatt found opportunity to grow in key markets and evolve with the ever-changing travel landscape. All of this helped position Hyatt for the post-Covid travel boom, benefiting both consumers and investors.

Chief Commercial Officer Mark Vondrasek explains how Hyatt’s latest brand acquisitions (especially in the lifestyle space) and its generous loyalty program position the company for future success.

It’s been a whirlwind last five years with acquisitions and growth. Most of it started during the Covid period. Many companies were focused on staying solvent through difficult times, but we managed to be victorious in adding brands that fit with our portfolio.

The genesis for all of this came from really listening to our customers. Hyatt doesn’t have scale as an advantage, but our advantage can be offering a range of properties in the destinations that are on the mind of our loyalty program members. They were telling us that they really liked all-inclusive properties, and even those unfamiliar with it said that if we offered them, they would be interested in trying them.

A good example of this was adding Apple Leisure Group, which has a large network of all-inclusive destinations. We went from having a small presence in that market to having the largest luxury, all-inclusive portfolio. Our traditional hotel and hospitality competitors are nowhere near us in that space.

We spent a lot of time from a data and analytics standpoint asking questions like “when you travel and don’t stay with us and why is that?”

This type of insight leads our development team from an acquisition standpoint. In the last five years we doubled the number of luxury hotels we have, tripled the number of resorts and quadrupled the number of lifestyle properties. Given our size, there was a lot of opportunity, and now World of Hyatt members can find us in more places.

Dream Hotel Group and Mr & Mrs Smith are two of the high-end, lifestyle brands that are now part of our network of properties. Our customer base aligned well with theirs, and both were a great fit for Hyatt help fill the top end of our portfolio while also introducing new destinations.

The German Lindner Hotels brand is another addition, which has added dozens of properties to Hyatt in Germany, Belgium, Austria and Slovakia among others, countries where Hyatt was previously not very strong. World of Hyatt customers gain access to more properties (now operating as part of the JdV by