Marriott International Plans Big Expansion Spanning Three Years -- WSJ

By Allison Prang 

This article is being republished as part of our daily reproduction of WSJ.com articles that also appeared in the U.S. print edition of The Wall Street Journal (March 19, 2019).

Marriott International Inc. said Monday it is planning to open more than 1,700 hotels over the next three years.

The hotel chain expects to add between 275,000 and 295,000 rooms by 2021, potentially bringing in $400 million in fee revenue.

Marriott said its plan assumes that comparable hotel revenue per available room, compounded annually, will increase between 1% and 3%.

It said it could have full-year earnings between $7.65 and $8.50 a share by 2021.

Marriott's shares were up 2.1% in morning trading Monday.

Over the next three years, the company said it could buy back between $7.6 billion and $9 billion in stock.

The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Land & Buildings Investment Management LLC was aiming to get a seat on Marriott's board. The activist investor has a small stake in Marriott and is displeased with the company's purchase of Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc.

People familiar with the matter said the Land & Buildings believes Marriott has too many brands in its portfolio and it didn't effectively combine Starwood's and Marriott's rewards programs.

Marriott, the parent of hotel brands such as Sheraton, Weston and the St. Regis, purchased Starwood in 2016.

The company said it expects 44% of the net new rooms will be in North America, while the remaining 56% will be split evenly between its Asia Pacific and its Europe, the Middle East and Africa and the Caribbean and Latin America businesses.

It expects the percentage of total rooms in North America to fall to 63% by the end of 2021, compared with 67% at the end of 2018. In total, Marriott anticipates to have almost 1.6 million rooms by the end of 2021, up from 1.3 million at the end of 2018.

Write to Allison Prang at [e-mail]

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

March 19, 2019 02:47 ET (06:47 GMT)

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