Placing hotel owners first is key for driving expansion, according to Christian Charnaux, executive vice president and chief development officer, Hilton.
The hospitality leader was speaking in conversation with Carine Bonnejean, managing director – hotels & international, Christie & Co at the IHIF EMEA in Berlin on Tuesday.
“We experienced 6.7 percent growth globally last year, and think that six to seven percent is a realistic annual target going forward,” Charnaux said. He noted that Hilton’s “owner-focused company and culture” was a big part of that.
Charnaux returned to Hilton in July 2025 from the business he founded, Inspire Brands, a restaurant company that owns Arby’s, Baskin-Robbins, Buffalo Wild Wings, Dunkin’ and Jimmy John’s. Reflecting on his role as chief growth officer there, he said: “Having an experience in a different segment while trying to replicate a Hilton-like system is a great experience.” But he said that he was “enjoying” being back at Hilton and “being the owners’ voice at the table”.
A big difference between the hotel and restaurant industry was having a metric such as RevPAR which “can prove that we are driving unfair share to a property”, he said. He observed that owners and brands need to focus on RevPAR’s components in order the “drive growing margins for the long term”. On this note, he said he was “hugely focused on cash-on-cash returns and owner returns”.
European growth
While the business’s growth has been relatively modest in Europe – “1.5 percent last year, and 1.1 percent this year” he said that that showed that the business was still expanding across the continent. “Supply has been economically rational; deals are getting done that make sense,” he said. “When I was at Hilton before, the number of independent hotels was in the mid-seventies. Now, it’s at fifty percent.” He said that thee conversion of hotels into “systems like ours” had created a successful model for other owners to follow. “We can drive better returns for owners, not by increasing supply, but by putting better supply in the market and driving demand to it.”
A key characteristic of Europe, he added, was its “huge inbound and outbound tourism market” which was inspiring a healthy development pipeline. “Longer term, the fundamentals are sound. Thinking about how we look at the business, there is a lot to get excited about in the region.”
Charnaux also referenced Hilton’s new franchise agreement with Yotel, the first brand in the newly established Select by Hilton. Established hotel brands that join Select by Hilton will retain their own identity and brand management while benefitting from the Hilton Honors loyalty programme and connections to Hilton’s distribution and technology platforms. “It’s complementary for them and on-model for us and our fee growth strategy,” he said. “We’re happy to chat with other brands too but our objective is to be highly selective.”
Looking at further opportunities in Europe, he confirmed that of Hilton’s 27 worldwide brands, only 14 are currently present in this market. “All of our brand are performing well and all have a global potential to grow,” he said. “We recently launched the Outset Collection in the US – just below Tapestry – which could have implications.”
Technology strategy
Artificial intelligence (AI) was another important lever for driving growth and delivering for owners, he said. “We have made massive investments – the guts of our tech platform are all in the cloud and highly scalable,” he added. He said that technology was helping the firm “drive more efficiency at the corporate level and be a better steward for owners”. Another focus would be harnessing AI for “hyper-personalisation” – retaining key data about customers such as personal preferences, to “deliver better hospitality at scale based on information we can deploy quickly”.
Drawing some conclusions about the hospitality industry, he said: “It is a highly resilient business given all the things going on in the world.” He said that like owners, who are making “twenty-year generational types of investments”, Hilton was thinking “in the long-term”, and remained “owner-first and economically rational”.