The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company

• 1. Introduction

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  The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company runs a luxury chain owned by Marriott International, yet one of its earliest hotels was once so empty that its owner staged a bluff. In 1933, only 30 guests were registered at the Ritz-Carlton in Boston. Owner Edward Wyner switched on the lights in every guest room so the building would look full. The name on that hotel had a long and tangled history. How did a name that began with a Swiss hotelier become a single company? Why did the same name once belong to several unrelated hotels at the same time? And what happens when a luxury lodge opens inside one of Kenya's best known wildlife reserves?

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• 2. A Name Crosses the Ocean

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  In 1905, the Swiss hotelier César Ritz and his chef Auguste Escoffier opened à la carte restaurants called Ritz-Carlton on the Hamburg-Amerika Line ocean liner SS Amerika. Ritz was known in the trade as the "king of hoteliers and hotelier to kings." He had redefined luxury lodging in Europe through his management of The Ritz in Paris and the Carlton Hotel in London. A second liner, SS Imperator, received its own Ritz-Carlton restaurant in 1913. The outbreak of World War I ended the shipboard restaurants in 1914. Ritz died in 1918, and his wife Marie carried on the tradition of opening hotels in his name.

  Albert Keller set up the Ritz-Carlton Investing Company, which bought the name and franchised it in the United States. The first American Ritz-Carlton opened in New York City in 1911, at 46th Street and Madison Avenue. Its kitchens were run by Louis Diat, who invented Vichyssoise there. Montreal's Ritz-Carlton opened in 1912, and Keller did not own it because it stood in Canada. Philadelphia followed in 1913 at Broad and Walnut streets, designed by Horace Trumbauer and Warren & Wetmore. Keller's Atlantic City hotel opened in 1921.

  By the early 1920s, the Ritz-Carlton chain stretched from the Plaza Hotel in Buenos Aires to the Carlton and Ritz hotels in London. Its Italian and French members included the Excelsior in Naples, two grand hotels in Rome, and two hotels in Évian-les-Bains. One of the Rome properties, the Grand Hotel, is today The St. Regis Rome. Only one of the American hotels would still be standing as a Ritz-Carlton by the middle of the twentieth century.

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• 3. From Mayflower to Ritz

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  In October 1926-29-year-old Edward N. Wyner bought a third-acre lot at the corner of Arlington and Newbury streets in Boston. He formed a partnership called The Ritz-Arlington Trust with his father, George, and a business associate named John S. Slater. The trust sold $5.8 million of bonds to pay for an apartment building to be called the Mayflower. The brick tower rose 18 stories and 201 feet, far taller than anything else on Newbury Street then. Strickland, Blodget & Law Architects designed it.

  Construction had only reached the second floor when Mayor James Michael Curley persuaded Wyner to turn the Mayflower into a world-class Ritz-Carlton with 300 rooms. The hotel opened on the 19th of May 1927. Rooms cost $5 to $15 a night, and suites cost $40.

  The opening was a great success, but the stock market crash of 1929 and the Depression soon brought financial trouble. The Wyner family paid the hotel's operating losses through the early 1930s, while interest on the bonds went unpaid.

  The other American Ritz-Carltons fared worse. The Philadelphia hotel became an office building after only a few years. The Atlantic City hotel was sold to Schine Hotels in the late 1940s and to Sheraton Hotels in 1959. The New York hotel was demolished in 1951, which left Boston as the last survivor. Edward Wyner died of a heart attack on the 5th of December 1961. His six sons tried to keep the Boston hotel going but could not overcome its difficulties, and they decided to sell. The unpaid bond interest would make that sale harder than they hoped.

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• 4. Blakeley and the Name

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  Gerald F. Blakeley Jr., a principal at Cabot, Cabot & Forbes, was one of the few people interested in the Boston hotel. The law firm Hale and Dorr spent more than a year clearing the bond obligations. In October 1964, Blakeley and his associates Paul Hellmuth and Charles Spaulding bought the Ritz-Carlton Boston for $5.8 million.

  Blakeley later offered a blunt account of the investment. He said: "Out of the 20 years I owned it, it made money three years. The other years it broke even, but from a public relations standpoint for CC&F, it was a tremendous asset." In 1981 he built a 19-story addition that added function space, 80 guest rooms, and 52 condominiums.

  In the late 1960s, Blakeley obtained the rights to the Ritz-Carlton name in North America, except in Montreal and New York. In June 1978, he was awarded the rights and privileges of the Ritz-Carlton trademark in the United States, along with a US Service Mark Registration.

  The name was also licensed to others. The Ritz-Carlton Chicago opened in 1975 in a tower atop Water Tower Place. It joined the Four Seasons Hotels & Resorts chain in 1977, since no Ritz-Carlton chain existed. For decades it was marketed as "The Ritz-Carlton Chicago (A Four Seasons Hotel)." It had no link to the modern Ritz-Carlton chain, though it used the name and the iconic logo. The property was sold in 2013 and left Four Seasons. It joined the modern Ritz-Carlton chain as a franchise on the 1st of August 2015.

  In April 1982, hotelier John B. Coleman renamed two hotels he was renovating as The Ritz-Carlton Washington, D.C. and The Ritz-Carlton New York. They had been The Fairfax and the Navarro. Coleman paid Blakeley 1.5 percent of each hotel's annual gross revenue for the name. Both hotels would eventually join the modern chain, which was founded not long afterward.

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• 5. Johnson Builds a Company

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  In August 1983, Blakeley sold The Ritz-Carlton Boston and the United States trademark for $75.5 million to William B. Johnson, a major Waffle House franchisee. Johnson assembled a four-person development team in Atlanta, headed by hotelier Horst Schulze. Together they created the brand and established The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company in its current form.

  In 1988, Johnson obtained the exclusive worldwide rights to the Ritz-Carlton name, with three exceptions. Those were the Hôtel Ritz Paris, the Chicago hotel, and the Montreal hotel. The Paris hotel has no association with the company and instead belongs to The Leading Hotels of the World. The independently owned Atlantic City hotel, by then converted to condominiums, was paid to drop the name. It became The Ritz Condominiums.

  Johnson enlarged the company from the single Boston property to 30 hotels worldwide in just 10 years. In 1983, Manufacturers Hanover Trust of New York lent him $85 million, secured by the Boston hotel. Manhattan Tops USA of New York refinanced the loan in 1989 for $136.5 million. The Sumitomo Bank of Japan refinanced it again in 1994. By 1996 the mortgage was in default, and interest and penalties had pushed the debt to $214.8 million. Sumitomo split the mortgage note into three parts, which separated the Boston hotel from the worldwide trademark rights.

  In March 1995, Marriott International, which franchised and managed over 325,000 rooms, bought a 49% stake in the company. In April 1998, Marriott paid Johnson $290 million for an additional 50%. That gave Marriott 99% ownership and the worldwide rights to the chain. Schulze left, together with executives Leonardo Inghilleri, Robert A. Warman, and Peter Schoch. They formed the West Paces Hotel Group, which took the name of its main brand, Capella Hotels, in December 2011. The partners also formed Solís Hotels in 2007.

  The original Boston building kept changing hands. Blackstone Real Estate Acquisitions bought it at auction for $75 million in February 1998, and a month later Marriott acquired it from Blackstone for $100 million. Christopher Jeffries of Millennium Partners wanted a second Ritz-Carlton flag in Boston for a new 155-room hotel and 270 luxury condominiums in Millennium Place. Non-competition clauses meant he could only get one by owning the original. Millennium Partners paid $122 million for it, though it had sold for just $75 million less than two years earlier, and then spent $50 million on renovations. From 2001 to 2007, two Ritz-Carlton hotels faced each other across Boston Common. In November 2006, Taj Hotels, a subsidiary of India's Tata Group, bought the original from Millennium Partners for $170 million. The Ritz-Carlton Boston became the Taj Boston on the 11th of January 2007.

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• 6. Ladies and Gentlemen

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  The company's best known motto is "We are Ladies and Gentlemen Serving Ladies and Gentlemen." Horst Schulze coined it while serving as president and chief operating officer. He also set out the specific service values that Ritz-Carlton employees still base their work on. Under his leadership, the hotels earned an unprecedented two Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Awards. The company grew from four to forty United States locations in that period.

  The Ritz-Carlton Learning Institute and The Ritz-Carlton Leadership Center were created by Leonardo Inghilleri, then a Ritz executive. He was an architect of the company's second Baldrige award. At the Leadership Center, executives from other companies around the world come to study the Ritz-Carlton principles of service.

  Simon Cooper joined in 2001 as president and chief operating officer, with a mandate to grow the chain through expansion and product diversification. Under him the company added The Ritz-Carlton Residences, which are private residential units. It also added The Ritz-Carlton Destination Club, which offers fractional ownership residences. On the 12th of August 2010, the company named Herve Humler, one of the founders of the 1983 company, as its new president and chief operations officer. He was to lead brand operations and global growth strategy.

  In October 2011, Angella Reid, general manager of The Ritz-Carlton in Pentagon City, Virginia, was appointed White House Chief Usher. She became the first woman to hold that post.

  The company also formed partnerships beyond hotels. In 2001 it partnered with Bulgari to operate hotels under the BVLGARI brand. It now has marketing agreements with Bulgari Hotels & Resorts, the Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas, the privately owned Ritz-Carlton Montreal, and The Ritz Hotel London. A Forbes article in 2020 noted a partnership with Asprey on "purple water" beauty amenities, including body lotions and shampoos for the guest rooms.

  The company says its headquarters are in Chevy Chase, Maryland. The headquarters address is actually Marriott's, in Bethesda, Maryland.

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• 7. Hotels Around the World

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  The Ritz-Carlton lists 115 properties today. There are 44 in the United States and Canada, 38 in Asia and the Pacific, and 14 in the Middle East and Africa. Europe has 11, and the Caribbean and Latin America have 8.

  On the 22nd of December 2009, the company opened its first "Reserve" property, Phulay Bay in Krabi, Thailand. Six more followed: Dorado Beach in Puerto Rico in 2012, Mandapa in Bali in 2015, and Zadún in Los Cabos in 2019. Then came Higashiyama Niseko in 2020, Rissai Valley in Jiuzhaigou in 2023, and Nujuma in The Red Sea Project in 2024. These resorts sit in exotic places and have between 50 and 113 rooms each. Until the 14th of April 2022, guests at Reserve properties could neither earn nor redeem points in the Marriott Bonvoy loyalty program.

  Some hotels are known for where they sit. The Ritz-Carlton Kuala Lumpur, which opened in 1997, offers butler service to all of its 300-plus rooms and suites. The Ritz-Carlton Hong Kong opened on the 29th of March 2011 on floors 102-118 of the International Commerce Centre in Tsim Sha Tsui. Its lobby is 425 m above the ground, which made it the highest hotel in the world. On the 4th of November 2013, the 145-room Ritz-Carlton Kazakhstan opened on the top floors of the Esentai Tower in Almaty. That tower is the tallest building in Central Asia. In January 2014, a hotel in Herzliya, Israel, opened with the brand's first kosher restaurant.

  Some properties met violence or politics. On Friday the 17th of July 2009, at 7:47 a.m. Jakarta time, a bomb exploded in The Ritz-Carlton Mega Kuningan, destroying the first floor. It went off two minutes after an explosion at the nearby JW Marriott Jakarta. Nine people died, including two suicide bombers. The hotel had been due to host the Manchester United football club the following Monday, and that visit was canceled. The Ritz-Carlton Moscow opened on Tverskaya Street on the 1st of July 2007 as the first Ritz-Carlton in Russia. CNN ranked its Ritz-Carlton Suite number 13 among the world's most expensive hotel suites in 2012. Management ended in July 2022 following sanctions linked to the Russo-Ukrainian War.

  In 2018, Ritz-Carlton announced it would enter the cruise market as The Ritz-Carlton Yacht Collection. Construction problems at a Spanish shipyard and then COVID-19 delayed the first ship, Evrima, which had been due in January 2020. Its first guests finally boarded in October 2022, sailing from Barcelona. The larger Ilma was delivered on the 15th of July 2024 and entered service on the 5th of September 2024. Its sister ship Luminara was delivered on the 4th of June 2025 and christened by Simone Ashley, with a maiden voyage on the 3rd of July 2025. Both larger ships carry 448 guests. Within weeks of that voyage, the brand would open a very different kind of property in Kenya.

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• 8. Controversy in the Mara

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  In August 2025, the Ritz-Carlton Maasai Mara Safari Camp opened as a 20-suite luxury lodge on the banks of the Sand River. It lies in Kenya's Maasai Mara National Reserve, near the border with Tanzania's Serengeti National Park. Lazizi Mara Limited developed it and operates it under a franchise agreement with the Ritz-Carlton brand. Reported starting rates were more than US$3,500 per person per night.

  Shortly before the opening, Meitamei Olol Dapash filed a case in Kenya's Environment and Land Court. He is a Maasai elder, a conservationist, and the director of the Institute for Maasai Education, Research and Conservation. The defendants included Marriott, The Ritz-Carlton, Lazizi Mara Limited, and Kenyan authorities. The suit alleges the lodge was approved and built in violation of the Maasai Mara Management Plan 2023-2032, which includes a moratorium on new tourism accommodation in certain sensitive zones. It also alleges there was no adequate environmental impact assessment and no meaningful consultation with affected Maasai communities.

  Dapash and supporting researchers argue that the camp sits within or next to a movement route used by wildebeest and other migratory species travelling between the Serengeti and the Maasai Mara. They say infrastructure, vehicle traffic, light, and noise could further fragment habitat in an already pressured ecosystem. Conservation organisations and some tourism commentators connect the dispute to wider worries about rapid growth in high-end tourism. They warn that more large lodges could worsen wildlife declines, especially in the eastern Mara and the Loita plains, where some wildebeest populations have already fallen sharply.

  Marriott, The Ritz-Carlton, and Lazizi Mara Limited rejected the allegations. They say all necessary environmental and planning approvals came from Kenyan agencies, and that the camp stands outside any mapped migration corridor. Narok County officials, the National Environment Management Authority, and the Kenya Wildlife Service defended the project. They describe the site as a designated "tourism investment low-use zone" in the management plan. They cite GPS-tracking data showing wildebeest using the full breadth of the Kenya-Tanzania border rather than one narrow route that a single camp could block. Supporters also point to expected tax revenue, jobs, and local purchasing.

  In February 2026, the court dismissed the lawsuit. It found that the suit was "prematurely filed" because the plaintiffs had not used alternative dispute resolution mechanisms. In the court's words: "Without Jurisdiction, the Court’s hands are tied." The ruling turned on the court's authority to hear the case, and it pointed the plaintiffs toward the dispute resolution routes they had not employed.

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