Hyatt is gearing up for the official opening of the 204-room Hyatt Regency London Olympia, making it one of the first hospitality operators to plant a flag within Olympia’s $1.7 billion (£1.3 billion) transformation in west London.
The hotel occupies a restored 1937 Art Deco building that originally served as London’s first multistory parking garage. The listed structure has been reimagined while preserving many of its original Art Deco architectural features, and guests will find nods to that heritage throughout the property in geometric detailing, concrete and steel finishes, and bespoke artwork inspired by the building’s history.
One Part of a Whole
For advisors, the bigger story is the neighborhood. The hotel is positioned as an integral part of Olympia’s reinvention, which will combine exhibition space, an international convention center, theaters, live music venues, restaurants, and offices.
“We are not only a hotel next to an exhibition centre. We are part of the creation of this new destination,” said General Manager Georges Moura during an exclusive media preview.
The opening comes as Olympia enters a new phase of its redevelopment. A recently opened 4,000-person capacity live music venue, operated by AEG Presents, has already begun hosting performances, while a new theater — operated in partnership with Trafalgar Entertainment and The Shubert Organization — is expected to open next year. More than 20 restaurants, bars, and leisure concepts are also being introduced across the estate, alongside the expanded exhibition facilities and international convention center.
For Moura, those complementary uses fundamentally change the hotel’s role.
“We want to be a warm base, not only a place for people to sleep but somewhere guests come before a show, before attending a conference or while discovering London,” he said. “We are part of the overall destination.”
The property has been designed to capture demand from traditional business travel as well as the blurred boundaries between corporate and leisure trips post-Covid — a sweet spot for advisors booking clients who tack a weekend onto a work trip.
Marc Jacheet, Hyatt’s group president for Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, described the project as an illustration of one of hospitality’s fastest-growing trends, widely known in the industry as “bleisure.”
“What I find particularly interesting about this place is how it mixes the corporate dimension with the leisure dimension,” he said, pointing to the growing influence of concerts, sporting events, and cultural experiences in travel decisions. More guests are planning trips around specific events while also seeking destinations that offer a broader experience beyond the primary reason for travel.
Success, Moura said, will depend on the different components of the Olympia ecosystem operating collaboratively instead of independently.
“We have to work together,” he added. “The beauty of this project is the promotion of a new destination. We are not working as silos. We are promoting the destination together.”
The hotel’s food-and-beverage strategy has been developed with the same philosophy. Alongside its own dining concepts, guests will have direct access to the wider Olympia culinary offering.
“It’s very exciting,” Moura said. “One day you can have an Italian experience, the next day Japanese, another day something completely different. All of this is part of the overall offering and one of the unique selling points of the destination.”
The Bigger Picture
The opening strengthens Hyatt’s presence in one of its most strategically important European markets. The company now operates 18 hotels across the U.K., with Jacheet describing Britain as one of Hyatt’s three most important global feeder markets because of the volume of outbound travel generated by U.K. consumers.
The hotel is expected to benefit significantly from Hyatt’s 66-million-member World of Hyatt loyalty program. Jacheet noted that around half of occupied Hyatt rooms globally are booked by loyalty members, and he expects demand for the Olympia property to come particularly from the U.S., U.K., Germany, and the Middle East — a useful signal for U.S.-based advisors with clients already collecting World of Hyatt points.
Looking beyond the hotel itself, Jacheet argued that London continues to offer compelling fundamentals for hotel investment despite wider economic uncertainty. Rather than seeing the hotel as another addition to its London portfolio, Hyatt views the property as helping to establish a new destination where exhibitions and conventions, live entertainment, dining, and hospitality reinforce one another to create a more resilient, year-round demand base.
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