Originally Posted by epiahtles

I don't think there is a truly unique hotel chain and it will remains this way at least for the foreseeable future. If you want to create a hotel chain that only have remarkably aspirational hotels, each properties will cost you a billion dollar, since typical luxury properties with 300 rooms usually cost $300m (if you want nobody-in-the-world-ever-saw kind of properties, then it'll be more like $3-10b per property). And the hotel chain should build/own/operate each hotels themselves (unlike the most of existing hotel chains which typically own 0.5-3.0% of their entire portfolio), if they want strict quality control over the properties. That means, a hotel chain with 100 truly unique properties all over the world, will cost you $100b or more. But not many entities are rich enough to burn $100b to build those kind of network, especially there is high chance of whole investment going down the drain.

And I don't think there is a market, at least not large enough for those kind of truly exceptional 100 hotels in the world. Usually hotel should be able to charge somewhere around 1/1,000 of what they spent on each units per night, to become profitable in the project lifecycle (usually somewhere between 15 to 30 years). That means, $1b hotel with 500 rooms/suites combo should charge $2k/night and $1b hotel with 200 all-suites should charge $5k/night, on average. Maybe there is enough demand to fill handful number of big properties at this price level, but certainly not 100. Furthermore, it’s not something that last for 500 years from the time of investment. You’ll need to spend almost similar amount every 20 years, to do the full renovation (on top of that, less-but-still-significant amount with higher frequency for brush ups too), since $100m renovation to $300m property is something like brush up here and there usually.