The register records who controls each house, and this section publishes it. 124 entities hold 155 positions across brands, houses, satellites and people.
The finding this section exists for is that capital does not follow the map. The four grand hotels that founded the category — the Ritz Paris, the Crillon, the Savoy and the Ritz London — are owned from Riyadh, Doha and by an Egyptian family, and three of the four changed hands in the last twenty years. Le Meurice, the Dorchester and the Plaza Athénée are held from Brunei. Le Bristol, under the Oetker family since 1978, is the last privately-held Paris palace.
The Investors page is the one to read. Several of the transactions in it ended a founder’s control of their own company: a right of first refusal that took Regent from Robert Burns in 1992; a hostile bid that took the Forte Group in 1996; a default that took Conrad Hilton’s eight hotels in 1931; a majority stake that ended the Shivdasanis’ thirty years at Soneva in May 2025. The register does not judge these transactions. It records that they happened, to whom, and what the founder had built first.
Entities are listed by the role they play rather than by size, because a company can own one house and operate twenty. Where a holding resolves to a page, the name links to it.