LOS ANGELES — Hilton has enjoyed a period of outsize net unit growth — perhaps the most meaningful metric for Wall Street analysts and investors looking at hotel brands.
Hilton reported 6.7% net unit growth in 2025. While that number is impressive, it should be sustainable, Hilton's Chief Development Officer Christian Charnaux said. That's because in the current hospitality development environment, so much of the unopened pipeline features Hilton hotel brands.
"One out of five rooms under construction in the world is going to be joining our system," Charnaux said during an interview at the Americas Lodging Investment Summit. "That's 20%, that's off of a basis that right now our market share is 5%. So you think about the the ability to grow that 5% to 6%, 7%, 8%, whatever it may be, plus the addressable market globally. If you think about middle-class formation and the propensity of folks to travel more and more, the pie is growing, right? So [we're] taking a larger and larger share of a growing pie."
Charnaux spent nearly a decade with Hilton before leaving and taking over as chief growth officer for restaurant company Inspire Brand. Upon returning to Hilton midway through 2025, he said he returned from what he called a "sabbatical" with a fresh perspective on the hotel business.
"It is a increased appreciation of the competitive strengths [Hilton] has, and making sure that we are actively deploying those strengths for our owners to drive their returns around the world," he said. "And I would say it's also that if you look at the individual pieces that we were putting together at Inspire, the template for it, in many ways, was Hilton. We were aspiring to be a multi-brand company, tightly integrated with commercial engines that drive out performance for franchisees and their returns and therefore their growth."
Some segments have evolved significantly in Charnaux's time away from the hotel industry, particularly with the increased focus on luxury and lifestyle hotels and more growth in residential both with branded residences and brands such as Hilton's Apartment Collection by Hilton.
The recently reopened Waldorf Astoria New York — which was closed nearly a decade for major renovations — is in many ways emblematic of both the transformation of luxury and the focus on branded residential. The property scaled down from 1,416 rooms to 375 and repurposed space for luxury condos, he said.
"First of all, it's a much smaller hotel," he said. "A 1,400-key luxury hotel, given the realities of labor and other input costs, doesn't make sense. So shrinking it down to a hotel where it does make operation or economic sense was a big part of that. We have branded residential as a strategic focus now. ... I think it's indicative of the economic model that in many markets is required for luxury to work."
For the rest of the interview with Hilton's Christian Charnaux, watch the video above or listen to the audio-only podcast version.