The hotel business: rapid expansion, and a brand that never came into focus (1990)

The speed of expansion, and a brand that never formed an image

The heart of this decision lies in the gap between two things: that expansion was possible with nothing more than capital and land, and that what the expansion was for never came into focus. President Ishibashi Jun'ichi spoke of a philosophy of his own drawn from surveys of overseas resorts, but a membership scheme aimed upmarket and the corporate and group mass-market selling that actually carried the earnings coexisted at cross purposes. While the tailwind of low-cost convertible bonds lasted, that contradiction stayed hidden beneath growing results.

It surfaced, rather, once the expansion stopped. When the post-bubble era made debt reduction and financial discipline the priority, a brand of no settled character came instead to be felt as a burden. The 2018 brand unification was one answer to the drift, but against the reality of ageing properties and shrunken demand it could not be the final one. The 2022 sale was the settling of an account — a side effect of diversification, cleared nearly half a century after the expansion that produced it.