The largest hotel chains in Europe

One of the world's leading hotel consulting experts - MKG Hospitality - has published a new rating of European hotel companies as of January 1, 2012. In the ranking were included companies, presented in 27 countries across Europe.

This time the top ten of the largest hotel chains of the Old World has been significantly changed. However, it mainly concerns 5-10 positions. The leaders retained their positions.

The French giant Accor is still the largest hotel operator in Europe. It manages 2345 hotels in the region under various brands. This figure is still out of reach for most competitors. More than one-third of hotels presented in the top 10 belong to Accor. In 2011 networks that are part of the Accor Corporation (Novotel, Sofitel, Pullman, Etap, etc.) got in total 40000 new rooms.

The second place was occupied by the Best Western. Best Western is a hotel chain, which is also considered as one of the largest in the world. But its room stock is almost 2.5 times lower than in Accor. Best Western manages and has franchise agreements with 1316 hotels on the continent, while the total number of rooms was amounted to 89743 at the beginning of 2012.

The third and fourth places in the ranking went to the Intercontinental Hotels Group and the Groupe du Louvre respectively. For the Intercontinental Hotels Group the main growth in 2011 was observed among the Holiday Inn brand hotels, for the Groupe du Louvre - Campanile and Kyriad budget chains.

Carlson Rezidor Hotel Group continues to slowly, but surely strengthen its positions in the European market. In 2011 it managed to win the fifth place from the Spanish network NH Hoteles, which can not finish the restructuring started a few years ago. By the end of 2011 the number of rooms in European hotels of Raddisson, Park inn and other brands of Carlson Rezidor Hotel Group has grown by 4.6%.

The British company Whitbread won already three places compared with the last year. The main growth was provided by the new Premier Inn budget hotels. In anticipation of the tourist influx Whitbread intends to launch 11000 new rooms for the Olympics 2012 in London. In 2011 Whitbread demonstrated the growth of the hotel room capacity by 11%.

8-10 lines in the ranking are also occupied by the well-known companies. Spanish Melia Hotels lost its positions because of problems in the domestic market. Hilton, on the contrary, moved up from 9th to 8th position due to the development of the DoubleTree and Garden Inn middle class networks. Outsider of the current year is a division of the German tourism giant TUI Hotels, which moved down from the 8th to the 10th line. In 2011 the company was forced to sell part of the hotels because of poor financial results.