Starwood Hotels & Resorts could see as much as a quarter of its business come from Asia in the next few years, the hotel operator’s chief financial officer said on Monday.
Starwood currently draws 15 percent of its business from Asia, said CFO Vasant Prabhu at the Reuters Travel and Leisure Summit in New York.
“It’s not inconceivable that it (business in Asia) grows to 20, 25 percent,” he told Reuters.
Starwood has 50 hotels in China and plans to open another 50 to 70 properties. In a few years, Prabhu said the region could be its largest market outside the United States.
“I think inevitably the U.S. component will decline not because our U.S. business won’t grow but because we expect our non-U.S. business to grow faster,” Prabhu told reporters.
Starwood is hoping that its international foothold will help it rebound from the worst downturn for the industry since the Great Depression.
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Forty percent of Starwood’s business comes from emerging markets.
“We’ve started to call them ‘faster-growing markets,'” he said. “It’s not inconceivable that in a relatively short period half our business will come from emerging markets.”
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