The Largest Hotel Group in Latin America is Cuban
Cuba's state-owned Grupo Gaviota, with 35K rooms, dominates Latin America's hotel industry.
Cuban hotel group Grupo Gaviota, founded in 1988, is Latin America’s largest hotel chain with 35,000 rooms. Gaviota belongs to the state-owned monopoly Gaesa, the business management group of the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR), headed by Raúl Castro’s former son-in-law, Luis Alberto López-Callejas.
In second place, we have Posadas, Mexico’s largest hotel chain. The group has been expanding fast. Under various brands, it owns, rents, and manages hotels, resorts, and villas. Before the pandemic, its CEO José Carlos Azcárraga Andrade highlighted that they’ve had new openings practically every month. However, it seems that the pandemic brought some significant challenges for Posadas. So much so that the company got court approval to restructure its debt in December. This allows it “to prioritize the use of its cash for operating activities to preserve jobs and help maintain the high quality for which its hotels are known.”
The list is generally dominated by Cuban, Mexican, and Brazilian companies. Although the big multinational chains — like Marriott with 63K rooms across LatAm — would crush this list, these ten chains have a lot to be proud of for providing guests a combined 146K rooms to sleep in.