Originally Posted by
Vince Chan
So at the time of 80s and early 90s, Marriott has very few brands, not to mention seperating JW. Do you know the situation of Starwood and Hyatt also Conrad at that time? Hyatt introduced GH and PH in the 80s . Are Park and Grand Hyatt Brand recognizable in 90s?
If you go back to the 1980s, the hotel business was completely different.
Marriott, ITT Sheraton, and Westin (Western International until 1980) were hotel companies, not hotel brands. Before these companies switched to asset-light business models, they would usually own and manage their hotels. (Franchising was for Holiday Inn and Best Western.)
I think there was a franchised Marriott at Berkeley Marina called the Marriott Inn, but this wasn't a separate brand in today's sense. Marriott cautiously opened its first Courtyard by Marriott, a genuinely separate brand, in 1983.
Marriott has a nice overview of its history here:
Our Story
Sheraton hotels ranged from roadside motor inns to iconic big-city hotels (such as the Sheraton Palace in San Francisco) -- and everything in-between. In the 1990s, Sheraton assigned its high-end properties to ITT Sheraton Luxury Collection and its low-end properties to Four Points by Sheraton, leaving those in the middle as regular Sheratons.
Starwood bought Westin in 1994 and Sheraton in 1998.
Today's hotel environment, where the big hotel companies tend to have ten or more discreet brands -- and Marriott claims 30 brands -- is a result of acquisitions of established brands and initiatives to launch new brands to appeal to additional categories of customers -- where "customers" not only means consumers, but also hotel developers and owners.