Elie Maalouf is a man who has clearly been in a lot of hotels lately.
In the weeks before we sat down at the Americas Lodging Investment Summit in Los Angeles in late January, the IHG Hotels & Resorts CEO had been to India for a week, Thailand for four days, and Zurich for a night on the way through. He is not, in other words, the kind of CEO who runs a global hotel company from a conference room in Windsor.
That restlessness shows up in how Maalouf talks about IHG's opportunity. He is less interested in defending the company's current spot in the travel orbit than in mapping the distance between where it is and where he thinks it should be.
With 21 brands, more than a million open rooms across 100-plus countries, and a 2025 full-year result that saw EMEAA outperform the Americas by more than four RevPAR percentage points — the hotel industry’s key performance metric — he has a reasonable case that the next chapter of this story is being written east of the Atlantic.
Let’s be clear: North America remains IHG’s biggest market by far. America might run on Dunkin’, but it also loves its Holiday Inns, too. However, Maalouf didn't sugarcoat the domestic picture.
The U.S. had a choppy year — flat performance, with an industry that probably had a point or more of growth taken off the table by a pile-up of headwinds: tariff anxiety, as much as a 20% drop in government travel, reduced inbound travel from Canada and Europe, a record-length federal shutdown, and interest rates that remained higher than anticipated.
“Each of those contributed 20, 30, 40, 50 basis points,” he said. “None of them was a lot, but you add them all up and that probably cost the industry quite a bit. But I don’t think those are long-term things.”
His late January read on 2026 — which came prior to the U.S. and Israeli joint air strikes on Iran and retaliatory fallout across the Middle East — is that most of those headwinds either don't recur or don't worsen. The World Cup is coming. The dollar has softened. The comps are easier.
Early trading, he said on IHG's February earnings call, is positive in all three regions. He's not making big promises, but the fundamental case — strong employment, record capital investment, and real wage growth — is intact.
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My original premise walking into our conversation was that developers, rattled by domestic uncertainty, were gravitating toward Europe as a safety trade. Maalouf dismissed it almost before I finished the question. EMEAA outperformance isn't a flight to safety in his mind. Instead, it's structural growth playing out across a 100-country network that runs, in his words, “from Fiji to Cape Town to London.”
The real engine, in IHG's framing, sits east of Europe, where you’ll find younger populations, faster GDP growth, lower hotel penetration per capita, and a middle class growing at a pace that has no real parallel in mature Western markets. India alone is expected to add 400 million people to its middle class over the next 15 years. India has fewer branded international hotels than the island of Manhattan, Maalouf frequently touts on the media circuit.
IHG has been in Japan, China, and India for 50 years each. It has been in Thailand 40 years. Six Senses started in Thailand. The second InterContinental ever opened was in Beirut; the third in India. Both are still open.
“We've been a truly global company for a very long time,” he said. “Our brands have a long tradition in the East.”
That tradition is translating into hard pipeline numbers. IHG passed 800 open hotels in China in 2025 and expects to hit 1,000 sometime in 2027. The company passed 50 open hotels in India, with a target of 400 open or under development by 2030. Japan, where only 5% of the hotel stock carries an international flag and inbound tourism has doubled in recent years, is producing IHG's highest fee yield per key of any market in the system. There were 32 country brand debuts for individual IHG flags in 2025 alone.
In Europe, Maalouf pushed back on the perennial narrative that London is being flooded with luxury supply. Net room additions are low, and planning takes forever.
“You're hearing about the same hotel many different times,” he said.
Plus, the source markets feeding London have diversified well beyond American visitors — returning Chinese tourists, Middle Eastern travellers, Eastern Europeans, Latin Americans, Africans.
London isn't oversupplied. It's just loud when there’s new activity — akin to when the Spice Girls or Girls Aloud reunite for a tour.
The Portfolio Finally Has the Right Pieces
The same day we spoke at ALIS, IHG announced it was bringing Ruby — its recently acquired European “lean luxury” lifestyle concept — to the U.S. for the first time, with Chicago as the debut market.
Maalouf had stayed at the Zurich property on his India layover and touted features like a compact room, knockout shower design, buzzing lobby bar, kiosk check-in, and no check-out. Just drop your key and go. He called it “an approachable Kimpton.”
For investors, the more useful framing is that Ruby fills a lane IHG didn't have — urban premium lifestyle at a cost basis that works for developers in expensive gateway cities. Thirty Ruby hotels are either open or under development, all in Europe for now. More U.S. announcements are in conversation, with new properties in Asia and the Middle East to follow.
At the other end of the price spectrum, Six Senses and Regent are where IHG has arguably outmaneuvered the field most decisively. Six Senses, acquired in 2019, is one of the most recognized wellness brands among U.S. luxury travellers — without yet having opened a single American hotel. That changes soon, starting with Six Senses Camp Korongo in southern Utah. Regent’s long-awaited return to the U.S. debuted in late 2024 in Santa Monica. In both cases, Maalouf is explicit that scale is not the goal. Scarcity is.
“True ultra-luxury, by definition, needs to be kept scarce. We’re not in a race,” he said of growth in IHG’s upper-luxury stratosphere. “We don't need to meet any targets on rooms. We have a million rooms in the world. The number of Regent and Six Senses rooms aren’t going to contribute to that room count and to the net unit growth in any given year. So, we can be very relaxed and just do the best project.”
The White Space Is in the Brands Already on the Roster
Asked about portfolio gaps, Maalouf's answer was more interesting than the usual CEO deflection. The most significant white space at IHG, he said, is within the brands it already owns.
Holiday Inn Express has more than 3,300 hotels open and is present in only half the countries where InterContinental operates. Extending brand reach to new countries fills a white space, Maalouf said. Ruby has 30 hotels in Europe and hasn't touched the Americas or Asia yet. Noted Collection, IHG's newly launched premium soft brand targeting EMEAA's vast pool of unbranded independents, is just getting started. Those 32 country brand debuts in 2025 were genuine first entries into markets where IHG was competing from scratch.
“We don't need M&A to grow. We have 21 very strong brands now, 11 of which launched in the last 11 years with a lot of runway,” Maalouf said on the company’s earnings call last month. “Those are still new.”
That said, the Six Senses and Ruby acquisitions are proof the playbook works, and branded home rental sharing remains on his radar, per the IHG earnings call.
Given that InterContinental puts the “I” in IHG, it's only natural the broader company would extend its reach in a way that matches its namesake. Maalouf appears to be doing just that — and with all IHG brands, not just the flagship: Holiday Inn Express in markets where it's never competed, Ruby in cities where lean luxury has no incumbent, and Six Senses and Regent kept deliberately scarce.
The portfolio is finally built to follow a traveller from their first Holiday Inn Express cinnamon roll to their next Six Senses singing bowl ritual.
IHG CEO Elie Maalouf will be appearing at IHIF EMEA in a session entitled: "CEO interview: Leadership in changing times" at 3.30pm on Monday March 23