Selling the six Hotel Trusty properties to Star Asia (2022)

Sell the asset that cannot earn, while it still fetches a price

To describe this as folding a business that the pandemic had made unworkable is to miss the point of it. The losses on the general-public hotels had already been taken, in a ¥22.0bn impairment the previous year, and the sale of the six properties in fact produced an extraordinary gain of ¥9.0bn. What president Fushimi Yuki had been describing in October 2020 was a conversion — turning something like fifty of two hundred rooms over to members — a plan to pull the ordinary hotels toward the membership side. The core of the decision lies in dropping that path and putting the assets on the market before occupancy recovered.

That said, it was not a withdrawal from general-public hotels as such. Tokyo Bayside, Nagoya Shirakawa and Osaka Abeno were kept because members wanted them, and only seven of nine properties were cleared out. The sale price has not been disclosed, on grounds of confidentiality, so there is no way from outside to judge how favourable the bidding was. And in the following year lodging demand returned past its pre-pandemic level and hotel profit recovered to ¥4.1bn. Whether this was the right moment to sell remains open to argument.