A Hollywood penthouse, four photo shoots and a useful lesson in publicity: give people something they can use. Inside the hospitality agency turning places into stories.
Hilton runs more than 8,000 hotels across 140-plus countries and barely holds the deeds to any of them. The real business is a fee machine wrapped around 200 million loyalty members - and it started with one man and a cheap hotel in Cisco, Texas.
Accor began with a roadside Novotel and grew into a 45-brand hospitality system. Its most valuable room may now be the one it never owns.
The luxury hotel company that owns no uniform look has spent nearly a century making independence scalable. Its product is not a room so much as a pact: global reach for hotels that refuse to become interchangeable.
IHG looks like a hotel company from the lobby. Behind the desk, it is a fee-driven platform connecting 21 brands, thousands of property owners and more than 160 million loyalty members - with very little real estate on its own balance sheet.