Marriot Hotels, which has been on a branding and building blitz in Western Canada over the past two years, has suffered the worst market capitalization decline among the world’s five largest hotel chains in 2020.
With approximately 6,000 properties worldwide, Marriott Hotels is the world’s third-largest hotel company and one of the biggest in Canada. The chain comprises 29 brands – including Delta, Fairfield and Sheraton – ranging from mid-level budget locations to high-end luxury resorts.
Since 2018 Marriot has opened more than a dozen hotels in Western Canada.
These include two luxury hotels in Vancouver at the Parq casino complex; the Civic Hotel in Surrey, B.C.; the Residence Inn in Calgary’s Beltline and the Westin at the Calgary Airport; the 346-room JW Marriott in Edmonton’s ICE District and the Fairfield by Marriott at the Edmonton International Airport; and hotels in Saskatoon and Winnipeg as well as in smaller cities, such as Fort McMurrray, Alberta, and Kelowna and Kamloops in B.C.
This January, Marriott broke ground on a 172-room hotel next to the Vancouver Island Conference Centre in Nanaimo, B.C.
At the pre-pandemic start of 2020, the combined value of stocks of the Washington, D.C.-based corporation stood at $49.51 billion (all figures in U.S. dollars). By the end of the second quarter, this had been cut in half to $24.25 billion, according to data analysis from StockApp, provided by Britain-based media firm Finixio Ltd.
“Although the company's market cap recovered to $33.86 billion in September, this figure still represents a 31 per cent plunge since the beginning of 2020,” StockApp reported.
Marriott is not alone in suffering capital losses since the start of the pandemic, which has hit the global hotel industry perhaps harder than any other real estate sector, due to travel restrictions and conference cancellations.
According to data presented by StockApps, the combined market capitalization of the five largest hotel chains in the world – Wyndham Hotels and Resorts, Choice Hotels International, Marriott International, Intercontinental Hotels Group, and Hilton Worldwide Holdings – plunged by $25.2 billion since the beginning of 2020, to a combined $79.2 billion market cap as of September.
The market cap of Wyndham Worldwide, the biggest hotel chain in the world with 8,092 properties, stood at $5.89 billion at the start of the year. By the end of March, this figure dropped to $2.93 billion. Although the second and third quarter of 2020 brought a recovery, the combined value of stocks of the U.S. corporation stood at just over $5 billion in September, an $870 million plunge since the beginning of the year.
The second-largest hotel chain globally, Choice Hotels International, lost $440 million in market capitalization amid the coronavirus crisis.
London, U.K-based Intercontinental Hotels Group, the fourth largest hotel chain globally with 5,070 hotels across nearly 100 countries, has shed 21 per cent of its market cap in the past nine months.
The total value of Hilton Worldwide Holdings stocks, the fifth-largest chain of hotels globally, dropped by $5.66 billion since the beginning of 2020, representing an 18 per cent decline in market capitalzation, StockApps data revealed.
