Purpose – This paper seeks to examine why and how M&A activity has been used by UK hotel companies over a 26‐year period and aims to provide a preliminary exploration of its relative success, given that the M&A literature suggests high failure rates or M&A transactions which do not achieve...

This article employs one case study, of Intercontinental Hotel Corporation, to examine the globalisation of the hotel industry between 1946 and 1968. The results show that the advent of multinational hotel development was characterised by the importance of government policies in shaping...