From saying no to certain deals, to facing the realities of a K-shaped economy, hospitality growth doesn’t always happen in a straight line, according to Mark Hoplamazian, president & CEO, Hyatt.
However, prioritising innovation was producing success, Hoplamazian underlined, speaking at the IHIF EMEA in Berlin on Monday.
In a fireside chat with Eric Hallerberg, vice president EMEA sales, Oracle Hospitality & Restaurants, the Hyatt chief touched on the firm’s technological approach, which has recently included an internal platform dubbed “hotel heartbeat”. Designed to create actionable insights for hotel teams, Hoplamazian explained that the platform was helping make general manager (GM) jobs easier on a real time basis.
He noted that, at the platform’s core, an artificial intelligence (AI) agent was picking up on data patterns and inviting GMs to examine if they constituted a trend worth addressing. “Sometimes the team needs to act, sometimes it’s nothing,” he said. “But the model also learns from itself. As so often in the tech space, you have to start with the user.”
Measuring the usefulness of the tool, he said that demand from other GMs to sign up showed that it was gaining a certain virality. “Success comes from other GMs not wanting to be left behind,” he said. “It will have been rolled out across some 250 hotels by next month, and across 1000 by year end.”
Driving loyalty
Another tech-backed tool driving growth is World of Hyatt, known as the “industry’s fastest growing loyalty programme”. This was operating as a genuine economic engine, Hoplamazian said, resulting in reduced acquisition costs compared to online travel agency (OTA) channels.
While Hyatt’s original loyalty programme started out as the “gold passport” scheme in the late 80s, the more recently revived platform, World of Hyatt, was “conceived as an experience platform not a points programme” he said. “You get angry emails when people feel objectified,” he explained, describing a platform that was seeking to create “emotional, not transactional” relationships.
“From the very beginning, we thought about World of Hyatt being a window into experiences,” he said. Wellness has become a big part of this, he noted, with hospitality’s mandate to “care for people, at its most profound, being all about improving people’s wellbeing”. World of Hyatt had become a successful discovery tool as well as a driver of revenue, he said, with the group’s digital interfaces moving in general in this direction.
“At the start of 2025, we changed the interface of hyatt.com to be a generative AI interface, allowing end users to express an intent,” he said. “So, you can input that you want to go somewhere which is above 70 degrees, has a golf course and a Michelin-starred restaurant within 15 minutes.” He explained that while this process was giving clients lots of options, it had also proved “extraordinarily helpful for learning more and more about our own clientele”. He said this this aligned with a personal mantra to “listen to understand, not listen to respond”. He noted that the launch of another tech-backed platform relating to group sales had “given back a day per week to hotel sales teams”, driving further efficiencies.
Economic realities
Success was coming despite economic trends, Hoplamazian said, acknowledging the “terrible circumstance” of the K-shaped economy. He noted however that the economic outlook was not a huge drag on Hyatt, due to the group’s higher-end positioning, with the firm rather seeing “higher daily rates and higher RevPAR”. He added: “We have brand strength but we don’t have massive representation everywhere so we have lots of open space to grow in.”
Hoplamazian piqued delegate interest by closing the conversation with a glimpse between the lines of Hyatt’s quarterly reports. “One of the most interesting things that people don’t see is the deals that we pass on,” he said. He explained that for Hyatt to complete an acquisition, a number of factors need to be in alignment, such as growing the group’s core customer base, and fitting in with its culture. “It has to work culturally – if it doesn’t, it will come back and bite you every time,” he said. “Truth is, there are many deals that we pass on.”