Wyndham Hotels & Resorts

• 1. Introduction

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  Wyndham Hotels & Resorts claims a title that few companies in any industry can match: the largest hotel franchisor in the world. With 9,100 locations spread across more than 95 countries and 25 distinct brands, the Parsippany, New Jersey company puts its name on everything from the no-frills roadside motel to the grand urban hotel in a cosmopolitan capital. But the story of how it got there is anything but a straight line. It runs through a Dallas real estate developer with a fondness for a journalist's name, a series of corporate spinoffs, a data breach that landed the company in federal court, and a billion-dollar acquisition war. How did a single hotel brand, born in 1981, become a company that franchises rooms on six continents? And what does it actually mean to be the world's biggest hotel franchisor when you don't own most of the buildings bearing your name?

• 2. A Name and Its Origin

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  Trammell Crow, president of Trammell Crow Company, created the Wyndham hotel brand in Dallas, Texas, in 1981. Crow was a real estate developer, not a hotelier, and the name he chose carried an unusual backstory. Business journalist Wyndham Robertson had written a profile of Crow for Fortune magazine in the early 1970s. Years later, Robertson claimed the chain was named for her, recalling that Crow told her privately: "He loved my name. I never got him to admit that he named the hotels for me in public but he did in private."

  For more than a decade, the brand grew as a regional hotel chain. Then, in 1998, Patriot American Hospitality acquired it, a company that would later rename itself Wyndham International. The brand had found a new corporate home, but a far larger transformation was already underway elsewhere in the industry. In 2005, Blackstone Group purchased Wyndham International outright, and then, within the same year, sold the Wyndham hotel brand to Cendant, a company whose own origins stretched back to 1990.

• 3. The Cendant Machine

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  Cendant's predecessor was Hospitality Franchise Systems, founded in 1990 specifically as a vehicle to acquire hotel franchise brands. By 1995, just five years after its founding, it had already collected Days Inn, Howard Johnson, Ramada, and Super 8 under one roof. Those four names alone represent a significant portion of the mid-range American roadside hotel landscape that millions of travelers have navigated for decades.

  HFS did not stop at hotels. The company expanded into other businesses and then, in 1997, merged with CUC International to form Cendant Corporation. By 2006, Cendant's leadership had decided to break the sprawling corporation into four separate companies. The hotel and timeshare divisions were spun off as Wyndham Worldwide, placing more than 9,000 hotels under 21 brands across over 75 countries inside a single publicly traded entity. At that scale, Wyndham Hotel Group employed more than 40,000 people around the world, with a lodging management arm called Wyndham Hotel Management serving its upscale properties.

• 4. Acquisitions and Expansion

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  In 2008, Wyndham paid Global Hyatt Corporation $150 million for U.S. Franchise Systems, which owned the Microtel and Hawthorn Suites brands. That same year, it purchased the Wisconsin-based Exel Inn chain and converted all 22 of its properties to Wyndham brands. Two years later, in 2010, Wyndham acquired the TRYP hotel brand from Spain's Sol Meliá Hotels & Resorts, renaming it Tryp by Wyndham and positioning it as a midmarket option for business and leisure travelers in cities like Madrid, Barcelona, Paris, New York, Buenos Aires, and Istanbul, among others.

  In late 2016, Wyndham moved into Latin America by acquiring Fën Hotels, picking up 26 management contracts across Argentina, Peru, Costa Rica, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, and the United States. The deal also brought in two new Wyndham Grand hotels in Uruguay and Paraguay, along with the Esplendor Boutique Hotel and Dazzler Hotel brands. Wyndham's portfolio of distinct brands grew to 18 with that acquisition. The following year, in the summer of 2017, Wyndham announced plans to buy the Minnesota-based AmericInn brand and its management company, Three Rivers Hospitality, from Northcott Hospitality for $170 million. AmericInn's roughly 200 franchised hotels and approximately 11,600 rooms were concentrated in the Midwest, Ohio Valley, and Mountain states.

• 5. The Data Breach Fight

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  In June 2012, the Federal Trade Commission filed suit against Wyndham following a security breach that had exposed the payment card data of hundreds of thousands of customers. What made the case notable was not the breach itself but Wyndham's response to it. Many companies facing FTC data-security enforcement actions move quickly to settle. Wyndham chose to fight.

  The decision to contest the lawsuit set the case on a slower, more legally consequential path. In April 2014, Judge Esther Salas of the United States District Court for the District of New Jersey denied Wyndham's motion to dismiss the case, a ruling that the press covering data privacy law had been watching closely. The decision signaled that the FTC had authority to pursue companies over cybersecurity failures, a question that had not been conclusively settled before this litigation. It was a hard-won legal precedent that emerged not from a company that cooperated but from one that insisted on its day in court.

• 6. Becoming Independent

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  In October 2017, Wyndham launched the Trademark Hotel Collection, its first soft brand product, offering more than 50 upper-midscale hotels across Europe and the United States. Soft branding lets independent hotels join a larger loyalty and distribution network while preserving their individual identities, a format that had been gaining traction across the industry.

  By April 2018, the company had begun rebranding most of its portfolio to carry the Wyndham name explicitly, turning Days Inn into Days Inn by Wyndham, Ramada into Ramada by Wyndham, and Super 8 into Super 8 by Wyndham. On the 30th of May 2018, the company paid $1.95 billion in cash for the La Quinta hotel brand, which was franchised to 900 hotels with more than 89,000 rooms, along with La Quinta's associated management business. The very next day, the 31st of May 2018, the hotel business formally separated from Wyndham Worldwide, which would later rename itself Travel + Leisure. The new standalone company, incorporated on the 1st of June 2018, took the name Wyndham Hotels & Resorts. In October 2023, Choice Hotels proposed to purchase all outstanding shares of Wyndham at $90 per share, an offer that followed an earlier direct acquisition bid from Choice that Wyndham had already declined.