Marriott’s Rajeev Menon shares his thoughts on the company’s growth in the Asia Pacific
Excluding its performance in the Chinese Mainland, Marriott International had a stellar year in the Asia Pacific throughout 2025 and it’s poised for even further growth throughout this year.
Last year, Marriott signed 109 new deals in the region and ended the year with over 730 properties in 22 countries, showing particularly strong performance in Indonesia and Vietnam.
In a leadership centric fireside chat with AHICE group president James Wilkinson yesterday, 10th March, at AHICE Southeast Asia, Marriott International’s president for the Asia Pacific Rajeev Menon spoke of the company’s growth and expansion throughout the region.
Menon said: “We are seeing growth in [our] collection brands, be it the Autograph, Tribute, or Luxury Collection. Just at the end of last year, we converted a Raffles Hotel into a Halcyon, and a Halcyon property into one under the Autograph Collection. We also recently announced a new Luxury Collection property.”
What’s driving Marriott’s regional growth?
Asia has proven itself a significant growth centre for Marriott International from its midscale brands to its luxury properties thanks to a surge in demand.
Vietnam, in particular, is becoming a major market for the company, registering growth of around 25 percent as of end-2025.
Other growth sectors in the region are Australia, Japan, and South Korea, all of which showed double-digit growth in the past year.
Menon further opined that direct foreign investments in Malaysia have also been instrumental in the global hospitality giant’s growth within Southeast Asia.
As he explained it: “At the end of last year, we had over 64 open hotels with another 36 or so in the pipeline, getting us to 100 in the next few years. A lot of it is because the government is now proactively chasing tourism.”
The emergence of a financially-empowered middle class throughout the region has also spurred growth forward for Marriott.
Menon and Wilkinson agreed that the middle class and the demographic advantage that was being talked about for years is really starting to take shape at present.
This has resulted in surge in aspirational growth throughout the market: with more wealth and greater access to travel thanks to low-cost carriers, Marriott’s growth in the region has leapt from just 37 percent in 2019 to nearly 60 percent as of end-2025.
As Menon puts it: “That tells you that the economic growth and the demographic advantage that this part of the world has is really starting to now deliver, and I continue to say that Asia remains a decades-long growth story.”
Loyalty programme spurs growth
The Marriott Bonvoy loyalty programme has also been a powerful force driving the company’s regional success.
According to Menon: “When you’ve got a loyalty programme with the power of Bonvoy that, today, has north of 270 million members, the results can be tremenddous. Last year, 74.7 percent of the occupancy in our hotels in APAC was driven by Bonvoy members. That tells you that three out of four rooms occupied in any hotel in the world were Bonvoy customers.”
Furthermore, Marriott’s strategy of hyper-localisation, where it has teams in markets running the business, is also enabling strong growth across every country in Asia-Pacific.