Hyatt Hotels to buy Two Roads Hospitality, adding 85 new hotels!

Hyatt Hotels has announced that they are acquiring Two Roads Hospitality, adding up to 85 hotels in 8 countries with 23 destinations to their portfolio. This purchase includes the brands Joie de Vivre Hotels, Thompson Hotels, Destination Hotels, tommie and Alila Hotels & Resorts. All of these brands are marketed as “lifestyle” or “boutique” hotels and mostly upscale, making it a good fit for Hyatt and giving them an expanded footprint in many destinations they are weak today. The deal is expected to close by the end of the year!

This is great news for fans of Hyatt Hotels and members of the World of Hyatt loyalty program. Hyatt has suffered from having a small footprint, making it difficult for them to compete with the much larger Marriott, Hilton or IHG chains. With only around 750 hotels worldwide, they are a fraction of the size of their main competitors – and that was a key reason I didn’t stay much with them when I started to travel internationally for work – there are just not enough hotels around the world.

Hyatt made a play for Starwood (and lost to Marriott) and more recently for NH Hotels (and lost to Thailand’s Minor Group). But they didn’t give up and it looks like a pretty sure thing, as they have the “inside scopp” with this deal due to common investors.

I think this is a great fit for Hyatt. The Joie de Vivre brand has a number of very stylish properties in California, including quite a few in San Francisco, like the Kabuki Hotel in Japan Town.

Joie de Vivre Hotel Kabuki, San Francisco

Alila has a lot of very upscale hotels in Indonesia and India, including on Bali. The Alila Ubud, in my favorite Bali-town of Ubud looks fantastic and get great reviews – I’d love to try it out!

Alila Ubud

And for for fans of Hawaii vacations, Destination Hotels has a number of properties there and in other popular leisure destinations. 

While Hyatt has been pretty well represented in major cities in the US and some key cities in Europe or Asia, as soon as you are looking at secondary cities in the US or leisure destinations abroad, you’ll have a hard time finding a Hyatt hotel. This addition of 85 hotels in 23 destinations will not level the playing field, but it’s a good step into the right direction for Hyatt Hotels.

While they want to close the deal by the end of the year, it seems like they still have to sort out the details – the Hyatt press release states that they will bring on board “the majority of its 85 properties in eight countries”. I looked at the list of Two Roads properties and there are a number of Hilton, Embassy Suites and Doubletree hotels among them that may not become part of the deal.

It’ll be interesting to see how Hyatt integrates these boutique hotels into their portfolio and I hope they handle the integration into the World of Hyatt loyalty program better than Marriott did their integration of Starwood. This will sure give me another reason to consider Hyatt properties!

If you’d like to get more travel related news or deals like this from around the world, please follow me on Twitter – I’m posting news daily, so you can stay up to date on the world of travel with my Twitter updates! Or, for a weekly update, sign up for my newsletter for a Sunday Summary!


Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *