HVS ANAROCK HOPE 2026 | Day 2 Highlights: Elie Maalouf in conversation with Mandeep Lamba

Well, thank you, Mandeep. It's great to be back with you and it's great to be here in Delhi, in India, once again.

Look, we deal with a lot of different circumstances actually. The weather is nice, fresh, and cool. You know it's a hazy time of year because of the burning of the farms and we know about that. We cope with it. We cope with a lot of different things, but the opportunity ahead of us here in India always keeps us excited.

Look, the trend that is really defining our industry and will continue to define it for quite some time is the decision by people to prioritize experiences over products. They want more experiences over products. Sure, the trend of travel driven by growth of the middle class, growth of GDP, that continues, but it's being supercharged by people's preference for experiences. Let's not start with travel first. Let's look at other kinds of experiences — sports experiences. The value of tickets, the people going to sports events, the value of sports teams continues to rise. Although you can see it all virtually, you can watch it at home, people still prefer to go — restaurants, bars, movie theaters, shows, everything that's live, religious sites. You can see and do all this virtually, but you prefer to do it in person. Live experiences are what people prefer. And we're actually in the business of live experiences. And that is a defining trend that is supercharging the travel industry and the hospitality industry beyond just the growth of GDP and the growth of middle class.

Well, there's no question that artificial intelligence, that AI, is transforming not just travel but transforming a lot of industries. On the one hand, two things will never change, which we just talked about earlier. There's always going to be a person, man or woman, that wants to travel for business or for pleasure. And on the other end, there will be a live experience for them to reach — that hotel, that restaurant, that bar, that guest room, that lobby, that spa, that swimming pool, that beach. That live experience will always be there. Now, what's in between is changing. How you get there, how you book, how you find it, how you share it — that's changing. So, two things will never change: your desire to travel and the live destination you're going to. But the mechanics, the distribution, the technology in between is changing, and artificial intelligence is redefining it. And we're on the leading edge of making sure that our customers, our travelers, have the best artificial intelligence tools to find that live experience. That live experience remains a human live experience, but is improved by technology and artificial intelligence.

Sure. Well, first, we're always going to be, as a global hospitality company, very big in the Americas, very big in Europe. But the reality is that the percentage growth, the rates of growth, have moved east — from the Middle East to Southeast Asia to Central Asia to the Far East. That is a long-term structural trend. The populations are younger. Average age in India is 26, 27. It's 40 in Europe and in the US. GDP is growing faster — 6%, 7%, 8% in India, 1%, 2%, 3% in the West. The population is younger, it's growing faster, infrastructure investment is higher, aircraft orders are higher — all these things drive faster rates of travel growth. So we're not shifting our priorities from the West to the East, but we are focusing a lot on these because that's where the highest rates of growth are, and that's very exciting. So where does India fit in this? If we look at this eastern basin from the Middle East all the way to Japan, including China, you're talking about three and a half billion people. Well, India's almost half of that. And it's not really a nation — it's a continent of about 20 different nations and cultures and languages, and even more than that. So it has huge potential. On one hand, you have the fastest-growing middle class in the world — going to add 300 to 400 million people to the middle class in the next 15 or 20 years. It has the fastest GDP growth in the East, actually in the world of the large nations, at somewhere between 6 and 8%. It has the fastest infrastructure investment, the biggest aircraft orders in the world. Those alone are defining and powering the growth of travel. And by the way, it has a very low supply — very low penetration of room rates per capita. So you have huge demand growing, very low supply. So there's a need for IHG and its partners to bring that supply and bring those experiences. It's made huge progress. You talk about structural issues — huge progress in infrastructure and regulation. I mean, I've been coming to India for over 15 years, even for my prior business. I was coming to India before the first new modern airports opened in Bangalore, Hyderabad, Delhi, and Mumbai. I came to the old airports. I was part of the projects that brought the new airports along. So I've been seeing this transformation for over 15 years, and it's been tremendous. There's still more work to do on regulation, on intercity infrastructure — I mean, the intercity highways are really world-class. Intracity, you know, we know it from our commutes, are still difficult. As we see in the air, there's some work still to do on climate, on environment. There's still work to do on ease of travel. But if India can continue the trajectory of improvement and ease that it's made over the last 15, 10 years, the future is great.

Land that pen — not so much geographically, but by sector. So you have the business sector. That's one big territory for us. India's business sector is growing rapidly. GDP of almost 4 trillion right now, aiming to be 7.5 trillion by 2030 — almost doubling, fastest growth. So the business community is going to grow. Demand is high, therefore people are traveling for business. India alone exports more technology services than Switzerland exports pharmaceuticals, than the US exports vehicles. So it has a growing export market, and that's defining a business community that we need to address from a territory point of view. So I'd say the business community, focused in the top five to seven cities, is our first territorial focus. The second one is inbound leisure — it's growing rapidly. One, from Indian nationals who are coming back, tourists that are coming in — great opportunity there. Vastly underserved in terms of high-quality branded hotels. Vastly underserved. So we have huge opportunity there. We're addressing that with new InterContinental hotels in Bangalore, in Jaipur, for tourism. We're addressing it with Holiday Inn and Holiday Inn Express with a very strong pipeline, and Crowne Plazas around these locations. And I'd say the third one, which distinguishes India, is religious travel. Not just tourism for sightseeing, but religious travel — over 100 million religious travelers a year. Only Saudi Arabia has a similar religious travel concentration and perpetual strength. That is very inelastic — up days and down days, that continues — and is also vastly underserved. There are some beautiful religious sites in India that have no quality hotels, no four-star, five-star, not even three-star class hotels to serve them, and we're addressing that too.

Look, we're not strangers to partnerships and acquisitions. In my 11 years now at IHG, we've done four acquisitions — most recently the Ruby brand acquisition, which will be coming to the east, which should be coming to India at some point. That's the fourth one. We've done multiple partnerships. But I'd also say I don't think we need that. If we find the right partnership and acquisition, we'll certainly be looking at those to grow, but I think the organic growth vector for us, organic growth opportunity, is much, much bigger. Go back to the point earlier — there is a high underpenetration, deep underpenetration of hotel rooms, and actually not that many hotel companies, domestic hotel companies. So even if you wanted to do some acquisition, there aren't really that many, because the industry is not that big compared to the demand. And so I think we have a huge organic growth opportunity. Look, Mandeep, we have 21 brands now in our IHG collection of brands. We actually have only really four or five playing in India. So we can bring a lot more firepower, a lot more product, many more brands, organically. Yes, if there is a partnership, if there is an acquisition, we're certainly eager and open to talk about it. But we have nowhere near reached the potential of our organic growth. We haven't even started.

Yeah, look, today we have 145 million IHG One Rewards members around the world, and growing. It's a tribe that follows us around the world. Every night, 1 million people stay at an IHG hotel. Yes, we have 1 million rooms, but actually we also have about, on average, 1 million people that stay with us every night. 65% of those around the world are actually One Rewards members every night. So it's a tribe that follows us. Over 80%, almost 83% of hotel revenue is contribution — enterprise contribution from IHG. So we have a very powerful enterprise, a tribe that follows us around the world, and yes, we stay very close to them. But going back to the earlier theme that you raised — artificial intelligence. AI is giving us a whole new dimension of getting closer, getting more intimate with these guests in a human way. We're launching next year a new customer relationship management system with Salesforce — a new CRM system that's AI-powered to help us get closer to them, understand their needs, anticipate their needs, make their stay more personalized, which has been the holy grail of hospitality. How do we personalize at scale? How do I personalize an experience to 145 million members individually? That's been very difficult. AI is giving us a new way to do it, and next year is really a game-changer moment for us.

I'll give you one that's already showing results at IHG. I'll give you one that will show results next year. And there's more, but just two. First one: we implemented in 2025 already, in all of our hotels around the world, a new AI-driven revenue management system called n2 pricing. It's now in all our hotels globally. It's first in the industry, industry-leading, machine-learning driven, that is constantly taking all the data that you can find in a market — from so many different vectors of information. Not just what happened last year, not just what the flight schedules are, not just what your competition is pricing at, but everything — the weather, the conferences, the cancellations, the traffic, the social sentiment — and helping hotels price at the most appropriate way to get the best yield every night. That already has materially improved economics of our hotels in a statistically significant way in 2025. Now, in 2026, we're launching a new content manager which will allow hotels to rapidly change the content, the images, to add video, to add voice, to add 20-language instant translation, to add chat, to add floor plans, to add so many features at a very low cost of change. Today, you can do some of that, but you've got to go with an agency, you've got to send photographers, you've got to do a lot of work. By the time you do it, you've got to change it again. This will allow you to do it in rapid sequence at a very low cost to have a better user experience on mobile and on website for IHG brands. That will help hotel P&Ls too.