Suddenly Hyatt is on a building spree. Why?

It's after midnight in Chicago, and Tom Pritzker looks totally wiped. He spent today running the family's hotel, industrial, finance, and real estate empire, said to be worth more than $15 billion. Tonight he has hosted an awards ceremony and dinner for the Pritzker Prize, the so-called Nobel Prize for architecture. Now it's the afterparty at the bar of one of the family's newest hotels, the Park Hyatt Chicago. The room is narrow, with high ceilings, large windows, and dark wood floors-basically a wide hallway that doubles as a watering hole. Moving from table to table, Tom and his cousin Nick,the family real estate guru, bump into a friend, architect Frank Gehry. "You know, I really have always hated this hotel," Gehry says, only half-jokingly, about the building's design. "When are you going to let me design one of your new hotels?" Tom shakes his hand with a smile and slight chuckle. "Don't worry, Frank," he says. "We'll find you a great project. We're building a lot these days."

It's big news to hear the Pritzkers talking about a hotel-building spree. Hyatt, of course, is the crown jewel of the family's holdings-the company that Tom's father started by buying a dinky motel near the Los Angeles airport and that has grown into a $5-billion-a-year global chain famous for its flashy style, high quality, and atrium lobbies. Yet Hyatt has never really kept pace with its competitors. During the past decade, as the lodging industry consolidated and expanded, it largely sat on the sidelines. The Pritzkers seemed content to extend their roster of 200 or so hotels one or two at a time, even as publicly owned giants like Marriott and Hilton added many hundreds and saw their market caps soar.

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Source - Fortune


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