Investing isn't just about cold financial analysis. It can also incorporate your own real-life preferences as a consumer, and although mixing too much emotion into what should be rational decisions about buying stocks generally isn't always a good idea, the insight you can get from understanding a company's products or services from your own personal experiences is worth something.
As I've been putting together the Voyager Portfolio to start out 2026, I've deliberately tried to focus on the widest possible variety of stocks of different sizes and from different industries. What they have in common, though, is that they haven't gotten the same amount of coverage as some of their industry peers, yet they stand out for some reason that many investors seem to be discounting. Today, I'm going back to my childhood to look at a travel stock that has clearly stood the test of time, evolving to keep up with the times in a rapidly changing industry. InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG +1.26%) hasn't earned the same love from investors as some of its better-known rivals, but the brands are ones that many travelers know quite well. This first article in a three-part series on InterContinental focuses on the road InterContinental has itself traveled to get to where it is today.
Image source: Getty Images.
On the road again
One of my strongest memories from early childhood is being in the car on long road trips. Going from my family's home in Houston to my grandmother's house in Pennsylvania was a three-day trip. Like many young children, the motels that got my attention the most were the ones with the flashiest signs. Holiday Inn, with its green cursive signs and lit-up star and arrow pointing to its buildings, was one of my favorites.
Looking back now, I'm not sure if Holiday Inns were really all that different from the other motels where we stayed. Features like larger pool areas were sometimes better than mom-and-pop properties. But my adult takeaway from my experience was to recognize the power of brand marketing in shaping the behavior of consumers throughout their lives. And in digging into Holiday Inn's corporate parent, InterContinental Hotels, it's interesting to see just how much the industry has evolved in half a century.
Building a global presence
Today, Holiday Inn is just one of the nearly two dozen brands under the InterContinental corporate umbrella. Crowne Plaza, Staybridge Suites, Hotel Indigo, Hualuxe, and the namesake InterContinental brand are some of the more recognizable sister brands. InterContinental has further leveraged the Holiday Inn name to now include Express locations modeled for business travelers and the Club Vacations resort chain.
All told, InterContinental offers over 1 million rooms in over 6,800 hotels across 100 countries around the world. About two-thirds of those locations are in the Americas, but InterContinental also has broad exposure across the rest of the globe, including 866 hotels with more than 200,000 rooms in the greater China region. Interestingly, nearly half of the properties in InterContinental's current portfolio carry the Holiday Inn Express brand, encompassing almost 350,000 rooms. Other chains are pitched more as luxury brands.
InterContinental also has an extensive pipeline of hotels in development. Another 2,300 hotels with more than 340,000 rooms are currently at some point in the planning stage.
NYSE: IHG
Key Data Points
Putting InterContinental's history in the proper context
Before buying a stock, it's important to understand the underlying business in which you're investing. Only then can you fully appreciate the financial results that the business produces. The next article in this series on InterContinental Hotels Group turns to the way that the hotel giant has made money and the sources of its financial success.
