Breaking: Minor exec expands on launch of 4 brands

BANGKOK – Bangkok-based Minor Hotels is launching four new brands to support aggressive growth plans and enable it to expand into new markets.

The new brands include The Wolseley Hotels, a luxury brand based on the iconic Piccadilly restaurant in London; luxury soft brand Minor Reserve Collection; premium soft brand Colbert Collection; and tech-driven, select-service iStay Hotels.

Currently with more than 560 properties across 57 countries, these brand additions are expected to help Minor reach a target of 850 hotels by the end of 2027, according to Minor Chief Commercial Officer Ian Di Tullio.

“They’re all positioned in high growth sectors of hospitality, which allows us to expand into new markets more efficiently,” Di Tullio told Hotel Investment Today. “It also allows us to start doing a smart positioning and repositioning of some of our existing properties. There are opportunities for us to reposition brands in spaces where potentially owners can invest less, get a better return and better internal rate of return versus only investing in the brand that they’ve been locked into from a historical perspective.”

Brand by brand

The luxury brand play, Wolseley, is one where Minor will be more willing to be a manager-investor, ranging from key money to minority stakes as it continues to lighten its balance sheet.

Minor Chief Commercial Officer Ian Di Tullio

Di Tullio said they will be looking at AAA gateway cities, ranging from London, New York, Paris, Dubai and Singapore, primarily via conversion opportunities. In fact, he said they are in discussion with owners that have signed with large operators and are “unhappy about being part of the general masses.”

“As owners, we’re kind of obsessed about making the full P&L work and not really looking at fees as much as the total profitability of the asset itself,” Di Tullio said.

The rollout will be measured with Di Tullio saying Minor would be happy to develop five to 10 over the next couple of years.

ADR is expected to be north of $1,000. “As you’re looking at creating an asset which has the design fundamentals of Wolseley, the service delivery of Woolsey, staffing of a Woolsey, which has a personalization and white glove approach with staff engineered to think about the consumer first, that works financially and economically if you actually have those rates,” Di Tullio said.

When asked to address the contentiousness of the Wolseley brand takeover from the very popular London concept creators Corbin & King, Di Tullio said, “History is history. It happens in many businesses…. The goal here is to preserve the identity and the legacy that that Jeremy [King] and the team have built… Some people will take sides, but hopefully what they’ll see is that this is a unique opportunity to bring a slice of the magic to the world.”

For the iStay brand, managed and franchised possibilities exist and Di Tullio said they have 10 or so conversations in motion. While brand acquisition isn't part of Minor's plan, it is looking at some portfolio conversions for iStay, according to Di Tullio.

He said Australia, where Minor is already strong with its Oaks extended-stay brand, is a strong market for iStay. “We’re in conversations on iStay pretty much everywhere with half in European and the other half between Southeast Asia and Australia.”

The compounded growth rate of soft brands for big hospitality groups is north of 50% a year on the development side. Not surprising, 75% of the market outside of the U.S. is unbranded, run by independents that are looking for distribution, loyalty and higher efficiency. So, the soft brands for us were an easy move.

Ian Di Tullio

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Di Tullio expects a mix of about 75% conversion to 25% new development for iStay outside city core and airport properties. 

This model fundamentally works with room counts of 100-plus and can range up to 400 rooms, according to Di Tullio, with ADR ranging from $50 in some Asian markets to north of $200 in European cities.

For the two soft brands, Di Tullio said some 20 deals are already under discussion and more so with the luxury Minor Reserve brand in Asia, the Middle East and Africa.

“The compounded growth rate of soft brands for big hospitality groups is north of 50% a year on the development side,” Di Tullio said. “Not surprising, 75% of the market outside of the U.S. is unbranded, run by independents that are looking for distribution, loyalty and higher efficiency. So, the soft brands for us were an easy move.”

Overall, these four new brands collectively rank third or fourth from a scale perspective with the NH and NH Collection having the strongest pipelines, followed by Anantara.

The expansion follows the evolution of the Minor Hotels Masterbrand in March 2025. The launch of the umbrella brand platform is accompanied by significant investment in the group’s digital infrastructure and distribution strategies, as well as a simplified loyalty proposition under a single Minor Discovery program, part of GHA Discovery which Minor participates in as a member of the Global Hotel Alliance.

Di Tullio said Minor has transferred all its traffic to minorhotels.com and seen an increase in the conversion of people that are now accessing the website. “The unsubscribes have been low and the satisfaction has been super high because people that transact with us now have more hotels to transact with. They can see the global footprint of Minor and it just brings additional confidence to their converting – meaning they book more and they book more properties, which is as designed.”