BERLIN — Europe and the Middle East are strategic focuses for Hyatt Hotels Corp. as the brand company has significantly grown its presence in both regions in recent years.
In a video interview at the International Hospitality Investment Forum EMEA, Nuno Galvao Pinto, vice president of development for Europe at Hyatt, spoke about the company’s growth strategy and expectations.
When he joined Hyatt in 2017, the company had 35 to 40 hotels in EMEA, he said. Now Hyatt has roughly 220 branded properties in the region.
“We’ve grown exponentially, both organic and through acquisitions or through partnerships,” he said.
Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece are the major markets in Southern Europe and are where the action happens, Pinto said. Hyatt will open the Andaz Lisbon in September this year. It has grown significantly in Spain in Madrid and Barcelona, and it has a project under construction in Seville. In Italy, Hyatt has a Thompson hotel project and Hyatt Regency underway in Rome. Hyatt is placing a developer in Greece to build a network to find opportunities to secure a hotel development pipeline there.
The United Arab Emirates is Hyatt’s fourth-largest market in EMEA, he said. Hyatt recently opened the Andaz Doha. It has two projects under construction in Saudi Arabia: Miraval The Red Sea and the Grand Hyatt Red Sea.
The investment market isn’t always easy, Pinto said. In the EMEA region, there’s money around, but there’s still a disconnect between the bid and the ask for many properties.
“Very often the entry point for hotels becomes very hard, certainly in emerging markets,” he said.
Lisbon, for example, is a city with high barriers to entry, he said. Companies such as Hyatt, with its Andaz brand, allow investors to capture demand that hasn’t been distributed in the city. The partnership with Hyatt lowers the risk versus going in with a hotel group with a handful of properties there.
Hyatt is focused on a specific group of consumers: those toward the higher end of the economic spectrum, he said. That means its loyalty program members are more likely to try out its different brands than those with a wider spread of chain-scale offerings.
Hyatt is open to both brand-managed and third-party managed hotels, Pinto said. Hyatt is a good management company, but it also has strong partnerships with specialist operators that run hotels in their respective markets.
“We have specialists in France, specialists in Italy, that know certainly, as you go into provincial cities, that are more nimble to respond to challenges that some of these markets have in terms of rate ceilings, recruitment of staff, accessibility, clustering amongst different properties,” he said.
Either way, guests staying at a Hyatt hotel have a Hyatt experience, he said. The company is involved from construction to pre-opening to opening to following up, even when a hotel is franchised to ensure that Hyatt guest experience is consistent.
For more from the interview with Hyatt's Nuno Galvao Pinto, watch the video embedded above.