Hyatt: An LAX Motel, the Kansas City Skywalk and a $6 Billion Family Suit

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Hyatt Hotels began in 1954 with the Hyatt House, a motel beside Los Angeles International Airport opened by Hyatt Robert von Dehn and Jack Dyer Crouch. In 1957 Jay Pritzker bought it for $2.2 million, and his brother Donald soon joined him. The Pritzkers bet that air travel was creating a class of flying executives who valued time over setting, and within two years they had airport hotels in San Francisco and Seattle. In 1967 the Hyatt Regency Atlanta, designed by John Portman, opened with a towering indoor atrium and glass elevators that became the signature of the Hyatt Regency brand. Today Hyatt operates over 1,300 hotels and all-inclusive properties in 69 countries.

On July 17, 1981, two skywalks at the Hyatt Regency Kansas City collapsed during a crowded tea dance, killing 114 people and injuring over 200. A late design change had hung the second-floor walkway from the fourth-floor walkway instead of from the ceiling, doubling the load on the fourth-floor box beams. Decades later, family member Liesel Pritzker sued relatives for over $6 billion, alleging her trusts had been looted. Settling and dividing the family empire required cash, and in November 2009 Hyatt raised $1.15 billion in an IPO under the ticker H, with Thomas Pritzker as executive chairman and Mark Hoplamazian as CEO.

• Hyatt first went public in 1962, and the Pritzkers took it private again in 1979.
• The first Grand Hyatt, in New York, was a partnership with Donald Trump, whose share the Pritzkers later bought out after lawsuits.
• In August 2009 three Boston-area Hyatts fired their entire housekeeping staffs, the Hyatt 100, and Governor Deval Patrick threatened a state boycott.
• Hyatt turned AmeriSuites into Hyatt Place and Summerfield Suites into Hyatt House, and paid $2.7 billion for Apple Leisure Group in 2021.
• PETA has pressed Hyatt over an Alaska hotel's Iditarod sponsorship, with over 40,000 public pleas and no response from the corporate office.