Team size: 200  

What are the most significant cases or transactions that your legal team has recently been involved in?   

The legal team continues to be at the forefront of delivering IHG’s growth ambitions, signing more than 460 franchise and management agreements in 2022 and navigating the group through external risks.   

Balancing crisis response and delivering strategic objectives is at the heart of what we do, and 2022 was no different. Highlights include working alongside the marketing team to launch a new loyalty programme, delivering a new tier and bonus point earning structure for loyalty members under a new name – IHG One Rewards – and supporting the rollout to more than 6,000 hotels across 100 countries.   

We also delivered an industry first by signing the Iberostar Strategic Alliance. Together, we brought to life a 30-year strategic alliance featuring branding, marketing, commercial, loyalty, and technology systems alignment through complex agreements.   

Iberostar Beachfront Resorts became IHG’s 18th brand without IHG purchasing or traditionally licensing the brand. This meant creating a new industry business model that maintained the existing ownership structures, respected the differences between a publicly traded FTSE 50 company and a family-operated company, preserved culture and values, allowed each company to maintain control over critical aspects of the alliance and set up a framework for future growth. It was something never done before in the hotel industry.   

The in-house legal team, supported by external counsel, had to ensure we delivered the business objective to a tight deadline. By building trust with one another through collaboration, compromise and perseverance, we worked through differences in language and ways of working to create this new type of business model without any precedent in the market.   

What do you see as an opportunity or risk over the next six months?  

Everyone is talking about artificial intelligence, and the risks and opportunities cannot be ignored. One of the potential benefits of AI in hospitality is personalised recommendations. With quicker and more accurate review and analysis of data from customers’ previous bookings, preferences, and feedback, AI can make tailored recommendations for their next stay, while bolstering the opportunity for revenue generation. But we also need to be attentive to the potential risks and downsides, and the legal team needs to stay ahead of this fast-paced area to be able to guide the business properly.   

From a legal perspective, AI is also expected to support the identification of trends and precedents through the mass review of large data sets, supporting the opportunity of streamlining or simplifying the approach to commercial negotiations. These insights should, in theory, enable a faster and simpler approach to transactions – which, in a contracts-based business, can only be a good result.