The British Columbia Investment Management Corp. (BCIMC) has sold its Delta Hotels and Resorts business to Marriott International Inc. (Nasdaq:Mar) for $168 million.
BCIMC will keep the underlying real estate assets for many of those 38 hotels but will sell the management, franchise business and intellectual property associated with the Delta Hotels brand.
“We were maybe the seventh largest full-service hotel company in Canada,” Marriott executive vice-president of mergers, acquisitions and business development Rick Hoffman told Business in Vancouver.
“This leaps us over Hilton, Starwood, InterContinental Hotels and pretty much every one else.”
Marriott will operate 120 hotels including 27,000 rooms if the deal closes, as expected, in April following Competition Bureau approval.
“Canada is a terrific market,” Hoffman said. “We have been pursuing a strategy over the past several year where we identified best-in-class regional brands that fit a need for us and form a growth platform. Delta fits both of those for us.”
He added that the low Canadian dollar did not influence the deal, which was negotiated over the past several months.
“There is a good and a bad,” Hoffman said. “For the mineral-rich areas of Canada, we and everybody else will be concerned about economic consequences that caused the Canadian dollar to fall. There could be disruption there. On the good side, from a tourism point of view, many of the Canadian markets, including the ski resorts, it ought to be very good for American visitors.”
One of Delta’s B.C. properties is the Delta Whistler Village Suites.
Maryland-based
Maryland-based Marriott has 4,100 properties in 79 countries, including 86 Canadian locations. It reported revenues of nearly US$13 billion in 2013.
