Corporate finance in hotel industry: strategies for growth. The Marriott Case

Corporate finance for hotel firms has to be examined and applied with reference to the type of company (single unit hotel, rather than hotel chain), in order to take into account the main specific factors relevant for investments and financing decisions. On one hand, hotel firms often look for non-equity relationships, which allow to grow keeping a certain flexibility, both strategic, operational and financial. On the other hand, single units hotel, often family hotels, have some difficulties in competing at a global level, facing big hotel chains and very quick and difficult to manage on line markets. In the case of a hotel, management-ownership configurations are various, depending on whether it is managed by its owners or by another entity that acts as a contract manager for the owners (Getz and Carlsen, 2005). In this chapter, I start identifying the literature on the topics, and then I try to define the potential risks in hotel firms’ development, to conclude with some ratios in order to evaluate the efficiency and profitability of hotel firms.