Hyatt Regency is a Finalist for Best Upscale Hotel Brand at the
2026 Travelling for Business Awards, and it owns one of hospitality's genuine before-and-after moments: when its Atlanta property opened in 1967 with John Portman's soaring atrium, the modern convention hotel was born. Six decades later, the oldest brand in the Hyatt family is still the definition of the great gathering place — hotels built for the conference, the summit and the seamless week of work, refined by longer practice than anyone else in the category.
The formula endures because it keeps being re-engineered. Regency properties pair headline meeting estates — ballrooms, exhibition floors, breakout labyrinths — with the daily infrastructure that keeps delegates sane: club lounges, all-day markets, gyms sized for actual use and service teams drilled in the choreography of moving hundreds of people through a programme on time. StayFit, networking spaces and the group's loyalty engine, World of Hyatt, round out a product corporate planners specify by name. Regency's scale spans more than two hundred hotels across the world's convention economies, from American second cities to the exhibition belts of Asia — coverage that lets a global programme standardise on one meetings brand.
The map is growing where UK readers will feel it most.
Hyatt Regency London Olympia opens in May 2026 as the anchor of West London's transformed exhibition district — a sophisticated new option bolted directly onto one of Britain's busiest events venues — while in the capital's east, Travelling for Business found the Blackfriars property a
discreet city stay with heritage, comfort and culinary flair. Abroad, the brand keeps landing statement addresses, from Times Square to a 611-room perch above Niagara's Horseshoe Falls, with Berlin's palace quarter to follow. Each opening arrives with the meetings estate already selling — the surest sign a brand's reputation precedes it.
For travel managers, Regency means predictable excellence at event scale; for delegates, it means the conference hotel that does not feel like a compromise. The nomination recognises the brand that invented its own category and has never stopped leading it. Winners will be announced at the 2026 Travelling for Business Awards, and Regency knows better than most how to run a big room on the big night.
