Business transient revenue at IHG Hotels & Resorts was up 2% year over year in 2025, according to executives speaking on a fourth-quarter earnings call. In the US, representing 44% of IHG’s system, business transient revenue per available room (RevPAR) also increased 2% year over year.
Michael Glover, CFO, said the systemwide results were “pleasing to see in a turbulent year, particularly across the US,” with growth likely to continue into 2026. He said that “as we started 2026, we saw really solid business demand coming in,” even as demand in the US was affected by storms and cold weather.
Looking at groups, Glover said, “what we see right now on the books is almost double digits up year over year. It looks like groups are going to be strong.”
The company’s average daily rate for the year increased by 0.8% compared with 2024, while RevPAR increased 1.5% year on year and occupancy rose 0.5 percentage points.
IHG reported $5.19 billion in total revenue for 2025, up 5% from 2024, while operating profits rose 15% to $1.2 billion.
Elie Maalouf, CEO, commented on IHG’s AI strategy, saying it is “broad and enterprise-wide,” covering guest acquisition, commercial optimization and cost efficiencies. This includes AI-powered cloud-based systems for revenue management, guest reservation and property management systems, a new content platform, an AI trip planner and a new unified loyalty and CRM platform powered by Salesforce.
“With the new content platform, which will be launched at scale this year,” said Maalouf, “we’ll be able to take all [our] digital information and put it in the right channel at the right time to strengthen the digital hooks needed for our hotels to be recommended by AI agents.”
Asked about potential disruption from AI, Maalouf said, “Yes, there is disruption, but there are two things that are fundamentally not changing: There will always be a guest that will want to travel for business or leisure and they want to go to a destination that has a ‘live,’ real experience.” He added: “We feel we are in a strong position to capitalize on these opportunities because of the huge strides we’ve made in recent years to modernize our tech stack.”
