Hotel groups talk about serving every traveller;
IHG Hotels & Resorts has spent decades quietly building the machine that actually does it. At the
2024 Travelling for Business Awards, the UK-headquartered giant was crowned Winner of Hotel Brand of the Year.
IHG's portfolio reads like a map of corporate travel's needs. At the summit, InterContinental holds flagship addresses in the world's gateway cities and Six Senses brings resort-grade wellness; Kimpton and Hotel Indigo supply boutique character; voco and Crowne Plaza, the latter practically synonymous with the meetings market, cover premium full-service; and Holiday Inn and Holiday Inn Express form the dependable spine on which most real-world business itineraries actually run. Around six thousand hotels across roughly a hundred countries mean a travel programme built on IHG rarely finds a destination it cannot serve, at a rate the finance director can defend.
Consistency is the group's compounding asset. Brand standards make a Crowne Plaza in Frankfurt legible to a traveller who last stayed in one in Leeds; the IHG One Rewards programme, substantially enriched in recent years with milestone rewards and stronger elite recognition, binds frequent guests to the system; and
IHG Business Edge extends negotiated-style benefits, discounts, reporting and perks, to the small and medium-sized enterprises that traditional corporate travel schemes overlook. Sustained investment in booking technology and the group's mobile experience keeps the administrative side of travel mercifully boring.
The 2024 judges weighed IHG against a shortlist of Mandarin Oriental, Marriott and Radisson Blu, luxury artistry, superior scale and European dependability respectively, and concluded that no rival matched IHG's completeness for the working traveller: right brand, right city, right price, reliably.
The group's development machine ensures the map keeps thickening where business actually goes. IHG's global pipeline runs to well over a thousand hotels, weighted toward the mid-scale and extended-stay segments corporate travel consumes most, and conversions bring independent properties under trusted flags at speed. For travel managers, that growth compounds quietly: every year, more destinations where the negotiated rate, the loyalty points and the predictable bed simply work.
The
Travelling for Business Awards exist to name the companies business travel would miss most, and IHG Hotels & Resorts' 2024 title identified one of the shortest answers to that question, with the group's global pipeline promising the map will only thicken.
