Choice Hotels Makes Hostile Bid for Wyndham
Skift Take
- Choice Hotels made an offer to acquire Wyndham Hotels and Resorts, which was rejected. The situation may lead to a proxy fight.
- Marriott and MGM's partnership launch delayed to early 2024 due to a cyber attack on MGM and the complexity of the integration, which includes the creation of the MGM Collection with Marriott Bonvoy.
- Hyatt introduces the Wellbeing Collective, offering tailored wellbeing experiences at 30+ hotels globally, with plans to expand in 2024.
The DJIA was up 13 points, but the Nasdaq was down 34, the S&P 500 was down half a point, and the 10-year treasury yield jumped .14 to 4.85%.
Lodging stocks were mixed. The big winner, obviously was Wyndham, up 9%, while Choice Hotels was down -7%. Ashford Hospitality was the other mover of note, up 8% on the day.
Choice Hotels went public with an offer to acquire Wyndham Hotels and Resorts. The offer was described as $90 a share, $9.8 billion including Wyndham debt, but since it is only $49.50 a share in cash and 0.324 shares of CHH stock for each WH share owned, the real value is more or less, depending on CHH stock. In this case today, with CHH stock going down on the news, it was less. CHH’s press release sounded like one of frustration, making it public that they were in negotiations with WH, but then they were ghosted by them. In other words, CHH was going hostile. Late morning, WH shares were halted for the company to make an announcement that they rejected the offer, for a bunch of reasons, including the risk of getting CHH stock, their belief that it would take a year to get antitrust approval and they felt it undervalued WH stock. Trust us when we say this is not over because by going public, CHH sort of backs themselves into a corner to go proxy-fight if WH doesn’t come back to the table. CHH said the $90 offer (before CHH stock fell) was their best and final offer. We will see if that is true. We did a Skift podcast on this topic, and it is supposed to be available Thursday so we will let you know on that.
A total of 558 deals were announced in the travel and tourism sector globally during the first three quarters of 2023, a decline of 33% compared to the same period in 2022, according to GlobalData. An analysis of GlobalData’s Financial Deals Database also revealed all the deal types under coverage, and most of the key markets recorded a considerable year-on-year decline in the announcement of deals during Q1-Q3 2023 compared to Q1-Q3 2022. For instance, mergers and acquisitions deal volume for the travel and tourism sector declined by 34.6% during Q1-Q3 2023 compared to the same time in 2022, while the total number of private equity deals and venture financing deals were down by 29.2% and 28.4%, respectively.
North America witnessed a decline in deals volume by 43.9% during Q1-Q3 2023 compared to the
