Overall ranking: 5 (17)
Hoteliers ranking: 2 (4)

Andrew Cosslett - Snapshot
Andrew Cosslett took on the £650,000-a-year role of chief executive at InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG) on 3 February 2005. He now heads up the world’s largest hotel operator by bedroom numbers and posted pre-tax profits of £284m on a £1.9b turnover in 2005. It currently owns, leases, franchises or manages 3,651 hotels with more than 540,000 bedrooms in nearly 100 countries and employs in excess of 90,000 staff worldwide (350,000 if you count the jobs created by franchisees).

Andrew Cosslett - Career guide
Andrew Cosslett, who was born in 1955, worked with Unilever between 1979 and 1990 where he held a variety of marketing roles on the foods side.

He spent the next 14 years at Cadbury Schweppes, which he joined in 1990 as marketing director, Schweppes GB. He progressed through a variety of senior roles that included chairman of Cadbury Schweppes Australia, chief executive of the Asia Pacific confectionery business and managing director, Great Britain and Ireland.

Before joining IHG this February, he was president of Europe, the Middle East and Africa at Cadbury Schweppes.

Andrew Cosslett - What we think
The ousting of Richard North, Andrew Cosslett’s predecessor, in September 2004, was a shock as it came just months after he announced a 55% boost to interim pre-tax profits.

According to chairman David Webster, IHG’s future was to be “increasingly focused on growing our global brands” in a predominantly managed and franchised hotel system. The execution of this strategy required a leader with skills based on brand development and operations.

Cosslett’s appointment highlighted a growing trend among hospitality firms to seek bosses from outside the industry as they moved from property ownership to hotel management.

The InterContinental portfolio was built up by brewer Bass from 1987. Having sold its brewing interests, Bass (renamed Six Continents) demerged its hotel and pub businesses in 2003 to create IHG and Mitchells & Butlers.

Three years down the line, IHG has largely completed its metamorphosis. It has sold 175 of the 198 hotels it owned in a series of deals of which the largest was the £1b sale-and-manage-back deal in March 2005 of 73 UK hotels to a consortium led by Lehmann Brothers Real Estate. 

Now the group owns or leases just 22 properties and only those in key cities such as London (the InterContinental on Hyde Park corner), Paris, New York and Hong Kong can be certain of remaining in the portfolio. Most (3,120) are now franchised and 490 are managed.
 
Expansion is now the name of the game and Cosslett plans to expand the estate by 50,000 or 60,000 bedrooms over the next three years, with China earmarked for growth from 47 to 125 properties. Of 1,028 new hotels in the pipeline, all will be managed or franchised.

They will include the debut of the extended-stay Staybridge Suites brand (to date only used in the USA) in Brentford, Middlesex, towards the end of this year and in London’s Southbank in 2007.

Cosslett also intends to focus on differentiating and defining the group’s stable of brands to make the offers sharper and more innovative.

The disposal programme has enabled IHG to returned £2.75b to shareholders (more than its flotation value of £2.6b) and the group is now worth £3.2b.

In the peer-reviewed Britain’s Most Admired Companies 2005 ranking, IHG was listed 92nd in the pan-industry top 220.

Andrew Cosslett –Further information

InterContinental Hotels Group profile on CatererSearch

InterContinental Hotels Group official website

InterContinental Hotels Group on Wikipedia

InterContinental Hotels Group profile on Google/Yahoo finance/Investegate

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