LONDON, May 13, 2026, 19:10 BST
- IHG will convert the 150-room Hotel Mount Fuji into its third Vignette Collection property in Japan.
- The Holiday Inn owner also disclosed another share repurchase, buying 37,286 shares on May 12 for cancellation.
- The move follows a first-quarter room-revenue beat, though Middle East demand remains the main near-term drag.
InterContinental Hotels Group PLC said on Wednesday it would add Japan’s Hotel Mount Fuji to its Vignette Collection brand, a fresh luxury-and-lifestyle conversion deal as the hotel operator keeps returning capital through a running buyback.
The deal matters now because IHG is trying to grow faster without relying only on newly built hotels. A conversion means an existing hotel is moved into one of IHG’s brands, often after renovation, which can be quicker than adding supply from scratch. IHG said conversions made up 35% of rooms opened and 53% of rooms signed in the first quarter.
It also lands days after IHG reported stronger-than-expected first-quarter revenue per available room, or RevPAR, a hotel measure of room sales against available capacity. Investors are weighing that demand against a sharp slowdown in the Middle East and a share price that recently touched record levels.
IHG said it had partnered with FUJI KYUKO Co Ltd to transform the 150-room Hotel Mount Fuji, originally opened in 1963, into Hotel Mount Fuji, Vignette Collection after an extensive renovation. The property sits on Mount Odeyama at an elevation of 1,100 metres, overlooking Lake Yamanaka and Mount Fuji.
The hotel will be the third Vignette Collection property in Japan, joining RIHGA Royal Hotel Osaka and The Windsor Hotel TOYA. IHG said the brand has more than 79 open and pipeline hotels globally.
Abhijay Sandilya, managing director for Japan and Micronesia at IHG Hotels & Resorts, called the tie-up “a significant milestone” for IHG’s Luxury & Lifestyle portfolio in Japan. Koichiro Horiuchi, president and representative director of FUJI KYUKO, said the companies were “excited to write a new chapter” for Hotel Mount Fuji. InterContinental Hotels Group PLC
Separately, a regulatory filing showed IHG bought 37,286 ordinary shares on May 12 through Goldman Sachs International on the London Stock Exchange. The company paid between $147.90 and $150.00 a share, with an average price of $149.5426, and said it intends to cancel the shares.
That followed a 32,713-share purchase disclosed on May 12, also through Goldman Sachs, at an average price of $148.9026. Together, the two latest purchases total 69,999 shares, worth about $10.4 million at the reported average prices.
IHG said last week that $240 million of its 2026 $950 million share buyback programme had been completed, cutting its share count by 1.1%. Its investor page showed the shares at $149.65 at 17:10 on Wednesday, down 0.5% from the previous close.
The operating backdrop is still firm. IHG said global RevPAR rose 4.4% in the first quarter, with the Americas up 3.6%, Europe, Middle East, Asia and Africa up 5.6%, and Greater China up 5.7%. Average daily rate rose 2.0%, while occupancy gained 1.5 percentage points.
But the risk is not hard to see. Reuters reported that IHG’s Middle East RevPAR fell 2% in the quarter and had dropped by about 50% in the current quarter, a steeper fall than Hilton and Marriott reported in the region. The company has said strength elsewhere should more than offset the Middle East hit, but that depends on travel flows holding up.
Chief Executive Elie Maalouf told analysts that “consumer spending is good” in the United States, while Chief Financial Officer Michael Glover said IHG was not seeing customers cancel trips over higher fuel costs. AlphaValue analyst Yi Zhong said IHG’s mid-scale brands were well placed for value-seeking leisure travellers, though business-travel exposure could temper gains versus peers. Reuters
IHG, whose brands include Holiday Inn, Crowne Plaza, InterContinental, Kimpton and Six Senses, has more than one million rooms across 7,000 hotels in over 100 countries, with a further development pipeline of about 2,300 properties. The Mount Fuji deal is small by that yardstick, but it fits the same playbook: add rooms, lean on brand distribution, and keep the balance sheet story moving.
