Banyan Group has spent three decades proving that an independent, family-controlled brand from Asia can grow to global scale without being absorbed by one of the giants. Much of the hospitality industry doubted it. The harder question is whether the group can keep growing without diluting the idea that made it distinctive.
That idea began as a single resort. In 1994, on a rehabilitated tin mine in Phuket, Ho Kwon Ping and Claire Chiang opened Banyan Tree Phuket and introduced the private pool villa to a market that sold rooms. By the end of 2025 the group they founded operated 100 hotels and resorts in 24 countries under 13 brands. In September 2026 it announced an agreement to take a majority stake in an African hospitality company, which would take the portfolio to nearly 130 properties and 14 brands. The company has been called Banyan Group since January 2024, a change made to distinguish the multi-brand group from its flagship brand, Banyan Tree.
The business model behind that growth has changed far more than the philosophy. Banyan Group now manages many more hotels than it owns, earns a large share of its revenue from branded residences, and runs brands from luxury to midscale. The conviction on which Ho built the company has stayed the same. A brand is the only durable defence for a business that would otherwise compete on price. This article examines how that conviction was formed, how the brand was built, how the business was reinvented, and what the next generation of the founding family inherits.
From an early start in 1994, Banyan Tree Hotels & Resorts has grown into one of Asia’s most successful hospitality brands with numerous international awards and accolades from publications like the prestigious Condé Nast Traveler and others. Banyan Tree is one of the most ambitious and iconic chains of up-market luxury hotels, resorts and spas. By successfully blending its environmental concern with the unique Asian traditions and heritage and the concept of individual luxury villas offering an intimate experience, Banyan Tree has emerged as one of the leaders in the hospitality industry.
Branding has been part of the strategy from the early start, and was born out of a necessity to differentiate a traditional Asian family business. Banyan Tree and its founders wanted to escape the price competition from lower-cost competitors on one hand, and to take the focus away from tough pricing on the other.
These have been the typical challenges for many Asian businesses trying to compete in the new environment and building competitive advantages. It proved to be a successful way of breaking away from an Asian commodity business and changed the focus onto higher value-added revenues. The brand is led by a centralised team headed by corporate management and its promise illustrated in the tagline “Sanctuary for the Senses” is delivered throughout the organisation as part of a dedicated business strategy centred on branding.
At the end of 2025, Banyan Group operated 100 hotels and resorts with more than 14,000 rooms, 76 spas, 71 retail galleries and three golf courses in 24 countries. Its corporate headquarters is based in Singapore and the listed company, Banyan Tree Holdings Limited, is traded publicly on the Singapore Exchange (SGX). The group held an equity interest in 14 of its hotels and resorts and managed the other 86 for their owners. It employs close to 15,000 people representing 95 nationalities across the global operations. The company is a good example of the importance of corporate management’s involvement in investing, building and driving the brand and all the related branding activities.
The idea of Banyan Tree was conceptualised when Ho Kwon Ping and his wife Claire Chiang were living in Banyan Tree Bay, also known as Yung Shue Wan, a small fishing village on Lamma Island in Hong Kong. As a young couple, they enjoyed island living and the idea of having a private sanctuary and believed this was what their peers coveted. Ho has said the name was chosen years later as a reminder that romance and intimacy do not depend on luxury and snobbery.
When his father fell ill in 1981, Ho Kwon Ping, then a journalist, had to return to Singapore. As the eldest son, he took on the responsibility of the family business and ran it as is often expected in Asian business families. He wanted to take his father’s family-run business, Wah Chang Group, ahead and away from the traditional revenue streams into different areas spanning from property to manufacturing. The business was under pressure, competed primarily on cost, and was not dominant in any particular industry or market. He thus ventured into the oil rig business on a large scale. Unfortunately an oil glut in 1981 nearly bankrupted the business. Although he worked hard to bring in contracts and made back the losses, Ho Kwon Ping realised through this experience that he needed to create his own path and build his own brand. Contract manufacturing had taught him a lesson he has repeated ever since. A company that does not own a brand will always find a competitor who is cheaper.
The path to that brand ran through Phuket. In 1984 the family’s company acquired more than 550 acres of abandoned tin mine at Bang Tao Bay on the island’s west coast. Ho has recounted that only after the purchase did he see a United Nations report from 1977 that described the area as unfit for development. The land was rehabilitated over several years, and in 1987 Laguna Phuket opened as Asia’s first integrated destination resort. Its first hotels were run by established hotel operators. One plot remained. It lay beside a lake and had no access to the beach, and no operator wanted to manage it. The family decided to run it under a brand of its own and to give the villas private pools to make up for the missing beach. A constraint produced the group’s defining innovation.
In 1994, the couple opened the first Banyan Tree resort in Phuket, Thailand, with Ho Kwon Ping’s brother Ho Kwon Cjan as the architect. Upon purchase of an old abandoned tin mine that was polluted, the founders decided to cleanse the acid-laden soil by planting more than 7,000 trees. By doing so, they transformed the ecological wasteland into the environmentally sensitive first Banyan Tree resort. Similar to how the banyan tree provided shelter to weary travellers in the olden days, the founders decided to name the resort Banyan Tree as a symbol of the relief and comfort provided by its natural properties, and of rest and relaxation to the world-weary.
There they pioneered the trademark pool villa concept, which has become one of the signatures of the brand. Today, the private pool villa concept has proliferated to other resort groups and is used as a benchmark in the hospitality industry.
The Banyan Tree Phuket was very successful upon launch so the brand owners decided to launch two other resorts at Bintan Island, Indonesia, and at Vabbinfaru Island in the Maldives soon after, both in 1995.
Ho Kwon Ping was born in Hong Kong in 1952 although his father, Ho Rih Hwa, a businessman and diplomat, was born in Singapore. Kwon Ping grew up and studied in Thailand. He went on to Tunghai University in Taiwan where the exposure to Chinese culture left a deep impact on him. After a year in Taiwan, he left for Stanford University in the United States. After returning to Singapore, he did his national service as a combat engineer. He later studied at the National University of Singapore.
Journalism came before business. Ho wrote for the Far Eastern Economic Review, the Hong Kong-based magazine, and in 1977 he was detained in Singapore for two months under the Internal Security Act over articles he had written for it. He has spoken openly about the episode and about the distance he has travelled since, describing himself in 2024 as a “capitalist reformer”. The idealism of those years was redirected. He and Claire Chiang, a sociologist by training, conceived their business from the start as a means of social and economic development as well as a source of profit.
He joined the family business in 1981. In 1994, after the success of rehabilitating an abandoned tin mine in Laguna Phuket, Asia’s first integrated resort, he launched Banyan Tree Hotels & Resorts.
Ho is Founder and Executive Chairman of Banyan Group and of Laguna Resorts & Hotels, and Executive Chairman of Thai Wah, the agri-food company founded by his parents. The three companies are listed in Singapore and Thailand. He was the founding chairman of Singapore Management University (SMU), which he chaired for 25 years, and has chaired Singapore Power and MediaCorp. He has served on the boards of Singapore Airlines, Standard Chartered, Diageo and GIC. GIC is Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund, established in 1981 to manage the country’s foreign reserves. A seat on its board reflects the standing Ho holds in Singapore’s public life.
Ho Kwon Ping has received numerous awards over the years. The Singapore Government has awarded him the Meritorious Service Medal and the Distinguished Service Order.
He is married to entrepreneur and former Nominated Member of Parliament, Claire Chiang, who is co-founder and Senior Vice President of Banyan Tree Holdings and chairs the Banyan Global Foundation. They have three children – two sons and a daughter.
Ho Kwon Ping said in an early interview about the creation of Banyan Tree and his philosophy about branding: “There are only two advantages in life which are proprietary: technology and branding. Since I am not a technologist, I decided that whatever business I was going to do next had to have a strong brand”.
Given the inevitable turmoil of the volatile hospitality industry, Ho Kwon Ping was convinced from the beginning that a strong focus on branding would give Banyan Tree a sustainable competitive advantage. This was proved right as Banyan Tree withstood the repeated crises of 1997/98, the events of September 11 and the Iraq War to name a few critical events for the entire hospitality industry. During the SARS outbreak in Asia in 2003, the company still emerged profitable by achieving average occupancy rates of 65-67%.
Later shocks tested the same proposition. They included the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, the global financial crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic, when many of the group’s resorts stood empty. “In this business we expect tsunamis, earthquakes, epidemics, riots,” Ho said in 2020. He has since put it more bluntly, saying that “survival is 90% of success” and that companies which hold to their own values are the ones that last.
The company has based its brand on the two main beliefs of the organisation. Banyan Tree resorts would become a “romantic escape” and Banyan Tree would be an environmentally sensitive and a socially responsible organisation. These underlying themes have driven all the branding activities of Banyan Tree.
Branding has started right from the locations of the Banyan Tree resorts and has been consistent through the designs, the facilities offered, and the ambience created in each of the resorts. In line with the “romantic escape” theme, Banyan Tree has placed a strong emphasis on the locations as a key element of the brand identity. The company has chosen exquisite locations, exciting environment around and a good transportation infrastructure to connect the resorts to the main destination highlights.
The resorts offer a unique experience for the visitors by providing them a luxury experience complete with self-indulging and pampering experiences like the Banyan Tree Spas which offer traditional treatments and fresh ingredients. The company operates a training academy in Phuket where all spa therapists must go through the compulsory 400 hours of training, which is above the industry standard. The academy was established in 2001 and is accredited by Thailand’s Ministries of Education and Public Health.
Banyan Tree believes in the value of the local heritage of a destination, so guests can find a Banyan Tree Gallery which exhibits and sells indigenous artefacts and handicrafts in every resort, in line with their belief of preserving Asian culture and heritage. This enables guests to extend the brand experience a little longer by taking home some products relating to the place where they have had memorable experiences. The company constantly cares to ensure that everything is in sync with the brand theme of romance, intimacy and rejuvenation. The group had 71 gallery outlets at the end of 2025.
Service culture completes the brand. Claire Chiang, who oversees learning and talent development, shaped a service philosophy the group calls “I Am With You”, which asks associates to treat guests and colleagues as equals in an emotional exchange and not as ranks in a hierarchy. Ho describes a resort as a stage on which guests act out their own stories, with the hotel team as the production crew. The implication for any service brand is practical. The promise is kept by people, so training and culture are brand investments in the same way as design.
Ho Kwon Ping has stated that he intends to maintain the social responsibility standards practised by Banyan Tree since its inception. He and his wife, Claire Chiang became interested in economic development and social activism as they both grew up during the Vietnam War years. According to Ho Kwon Ping, corporate social responsibility was an integrated part of the Banyan Tree group from the early start. He stated that: “Banyan Tree was also a vehicle for us, using business as a means to create something that we hope is beautiful and sustainable, but at the same time using business as a means to enable many of the deep-seated beliefs we have about sustainable development”.
Ho Kwon Ping continued: “The core beliefs that inform the group’s sustainability policies, which range from building and running resorts with as little environmental damage as possible to conducting community development and environmental projects at each resort, are more fundamental to us than the notion of building a Banyan Tree. So there is no way we could possibly lose that”.
Concern for the nature and environment surrounding the resorts has always been a trademark of Banyan Tree. Many environmentalists appreciate their efforts to nurture and protect the surroundings of their resorts. True to its belief that environmentally sustainable and socially responsible tourism is compatible with making profits, Banyan Tree has established the Green Imperative Fund mechanism and Banyan Tree Global Foundation to extend financial assistance to environment conservation and community projects.
The Green Imperative Fund forms part of the Stay For Good programme, which crowd sources micro-contributions from guests during their stay, with every dollar matched by Banyan Tree. The fund was launched in 2001 and supports social and environmental efforts whose primary beneficiary is external to Banyan Tree.
Banyan Tree has also taken a conscious decision to minimise damage to the natural environment when building new resorts. The company is building villas around trees and boulders rather than cutting or excavating them. At Vabbinfaru in the Maldives, the resort was fabricated off-site and shipped to the island to protect the surrounding coral reef. In Bintan, the villas were raised on stilts to limit the impact on the rainforest.
The company also engages in numerous projects such as the Sea Turtle Protection programme and has built health clinics, schools, and temples for the communities in which their resorts are located. A marine laboratory has operated at its Maldives resort since 2004 for research, conservation and education.
These actions have endeared Banyan Tree to the public and the media which often features the brand and its resorts. It has also taken a keen interest in providing support for young people’s education globally and sources most of the materials required for its artefacts of Banyan Tree Gallery from the Asian cottage industries.
When the Asian tsunami struck in December 2004, none of the properties were badly damaged from the disaster. As part of the continued efforts to provide assistance to the local community, Banyan Tree decided to focus on medium- and long-term relief efforts aimed at rebuilding shattered lives. To address these concerns, the company set up the Tsunami Recovery Fund working with the local authorities to determine the community needs. The staff voluntarily contributed 5% of their salaries to the recovery fund run by the company. Additionally, guests at the resorts could donate USD 2 per room per night, which Banyan Tree matched. With the funds, the company purchased boats for fishermen and building material for use in construction of houses and schools.
The approach has since moved from programmes to management systems. The company has published a sustainability report every year since its listing in 2006. It has aligned itself with the Science Based Targets initiative, links sustainability measures to compensation, and in 2025 completed its first double materiality assessment. A Rewilding Banyan Fund, launched in November 2024, sets aside USD 1 for every direct booking on the group’s websites to restore natural habitats, following a pilot at Laguna Phuket in which 7,500 saplings of 84 native species were planted.
The second generation has pushed the idea furthest. “Sustainability is not a side aspect of what we do – it is the business,” Ho Ren Yung, Deputy Chief Executive Officer, said in 2026. She has also been candid that progress towards the emissions targets is uneven and that the group is not yet on track. That candour is a strength, because a brand built on environmental credibility loses more from overstatement than from an honest account of a difficult target.
Ho Kwon Ping has widened the definition. “If you’re going to talk about sustainability, the word implies: What can last?” he said in 2025. For him it covers financial resilience, governance and the treatment of staff and shareholders as much as carbon. In 2026 he said his own priority had shifted from mitigating climate change to adapting to it, because resorts in exposed locations must prepare for the drought and flooding that are already arriving.
Banyan Tree has been very successful in creating a very strong personality around these core values. Delivering all that it promises and leading by example in social causes, Banyan Tree has built a brand with minimal advertising and other traditional brand building methods.
The result is that Banyan Tree has established premium pricing power for its brand portfolio.
Banyan Tree initially resorted to advertising to build awareness in the market, but the advertising budget was soon cut to save costs. In fact, the overall marketing budget of Banyan Tree in its early years was 7% of the total revenue, with 60% allocated for trade and 40% allocated for consumer promotions. The entire brand communications strategy has been based on third party endorsements, word-of-mouth and public relations.
In the early years, Banyan Tree used an international advertising agency to create their marketing communications. The agency designed the Banyan Tree logo and came up with the tagline “Sanctuary for the Senses” together with the Banyan Tree management team. Extensive advertising was used to gain initial recognition when the Banyan Tree brand was first launched.
Recognition came early. In 1992, before the first Banyan Tree had opened, Laguna Phuket won the American Express and International Hotel Association Environmental Award for remediating the site at Bang Tao Bay. This made the entire hospitality industry take notice of the new entrant as a United Nations report had previously described the former mining site as unfit for development. Banyan Tree did extensive rehabilitation work costing a total of USD 250 million.
This was followed by a string of awards for the Best Beach Resort, Worlds Best Spa Resort, and many others from such reputed magazines and organisations like Condé Nast Traveller UK, TTG Awards, World Travel Awards, The Indonesia Travels and Tourism Awards, Best Resort in China, Best Resort Hotel in Asia Pacific, Tourism for Tomorrow Award (2012) and many others. Banyan Tree and its portfolio brands have won more than 4,000 awards and accolades since the company was established in 1994.
This generated lot of awareness and curiosity in the industry. Banyan Tree also uses public relations as an important brand building strategy, and the company invites editors and writers of prestigious travel and leisure magazines to visit the resorts. Banyan Tree makes sure that high-quality photo shoots are ready for use by media, which ensures the resorts are portrayed in line with the brand promise.
The same logic now runs through digital channels. Ho has described guest reviews and photographs shared online as part of the evolving literature of each resort, written by the guests and read by those who follow them. In January 2025 Banyan Tree Club & Spa Seoul served as the “Paradise” location in a season of the Netflix dating series Single’s Inferno, the kind of third-party exposure that advertising cannot buy. The group has also added a channel of its own in withBanyan, a membership programme launched in 2024 to build direct relationships and repeat stays.
Editorial coverage combined with word-of-mouth recommendations from customers and co-branding activities with strategic partners have since the launch of the company served as the major channels for brand communications. The media coverage has helped build the Banyan Tree brand portfolio’s international awareness and credibility, and the overall brand equity of Banyan Tree.
The strong belief in branding by Banyan Tree’s corporate management has started to pay off, and the Banyan Tree brand equity has enabled new revenue streams for the organisation. Following its successful opening of the Banyan Tree resort in Phuket in 1994, the company decided to distinctively brand its Spa and Gallery experiences, as Banyan Tree Spa and Banyan Tree Gallery respectively. Today, almost every Banyan Tree property includes a Spa.
Leveraging its strong brand equity, Banyan Tree extended the brand to launch Angsana in 2000, Cassia in 2014 and Dhawa in 2015.
Angsana: A contemporary destination playground designed to bring back the adventure into travel whatever one’s age, Angsana is positioned one tier below the flagship and also operates stand-alone Angsana Spas. With the backing of the Banyan Tree brand and its strong recognition in the leisure industry, Angsana has been well received around the world.
In 2003, Banyan Tree made a line extension and opened Colours of Angsana, a sister chain of resorts under the Angsana brand. The hotels were launched in more remote areas of the world including UNESCO’s World Heritage sites, and located in off-the-beaten track destinations like Laos, Sri Lanka and China. The brand was later discontinued and wrapped under the Angsana brand.
Cassia: In June 2014, Banyan Tree announced the launch of their new brand, Cassia, focusing on a new market for the company. Banyan Tree had identified a niche in the hospitality market which they wanted to explore through their expertise in management, design and innovation to create a new proposition in the serviced apartment industry. The new venture brought the Banyan Tree portfolio to three unique brands.
Cassia was created to bring together investment opportunities for the growing middle-class looking for affordable holiday homes as well as the opportunity to develop an innovative hotel product in the serviced apartment segment. Each Cassia is designed with one or two-bedroom units that provide owners with a home away from home experience, targeting young families, couples and groups of friends. Owners of Cassia properties have the option to stay at the property for a certain number of days a year and then lease them out for the rest of the year as serviced apartments under Banyan Tree’s management.
Ho Kwon Ping, Executive Chairman, Banyan Tree Group, said at the launch: “The extended stay segment has been overlooked in recent years so we took the opportunity to innovate and create a hospitality product that meets the demands and needs of today’s travelers”. He continued: “With affordable price points, proximity to existing Group properties as well as lower operating costing via a unique service model, Cassia offers potential for strong yields and returns. It also enables owners to stay in their own property as well as enjoy additional lifestyle benefits”.
The first Cassia opened in Phuket in 2015. By the end of 2025 the brand was present in Thailand, Indonesia and South Korea. These measures not only allow Banyan Tree to increase its awareness in new markets and gain international momentum, but also create a strong platform for a portfolio of sub-brands that can be a source of long-term revenue generation.
Dhawa: In 2015, Banyan Tree launched its fourth brand, Dhawa, a casual and contemporary full-service hotel targeting middle-class travellers. It focuses on providing a personable and individual experience for guests. With quirky room designs, the hotel provides guests numerous options to customise room settings to their preferences. For example, guests can use their e-concierge to order any food and beverage or additional pillows, select from various bathroom mood lightings, and connect their devices to play their individual music playlist on the Bluetooth speakers.
The first Dhawa opened at Cayo Santa Maria in Cuba in 2016. By the end of 2025 the brand had hotels in China, Japan, the Maldives and Vietnam as well.
A portfolio built for independence: The larger shift came after 2020. Between 2021 and 2023 the group roughly doubled its number of brands. It added Garrya in the upscale segment, Homm and Folio in the midscale segment, and two extensions of the flagship: Banyan Tree Escape, a concept of small nature retreats, and Banyan Tree Veya, built around wellbeing. In January 2024, in its 30th anniversary year, the corporate brand changed from Banyan Tree Group to Banyan Group. The purpose was architectural. The flagship keeps its luxury positioning, and the group name carries the wider portfolio.
Ho has been explicit about the reasoning. Several admired boutique hotel brands from Asia stayed narrow and were eventually sold to larger groups. In his view a single brand is too small a base on which to remain independent. “If you don’t want to be eaten up … you have to broaden your base so that you can be stable financially,” he said in 2023.
The wider portfolio also solves a practical problem. Hotel owners often approach the group with projects that do not suit a luxury pool villa resort: a city conversion, a compact hotel in a business district, a serviced residence. A range that runs from luxury to midscale lets the group accept those mandates under a suitable name and reserve Banyan Tree for the sites that merit it. The 13 brands counted at the end of 2025 fall into three groups. The first is the luxury flagship with its Escape and Veya extensions. The second covers the upscale and midscale tiers: Angsana and its Heritage Collection, Garrya, Dhawa, Homm, Cassia and Folio. The third consists of Laguna, Skypark and Bellaguna, the names used for integrated destinations and residences.
The reinvention started from a position of weakness. In 2015 the company reported a loss. The supply of luxury hotels in several of its markets had grown faster than demand, some hotel owners had fallen behind on management fees, and in early 2016 the company cut about 160 of its 1,400 corporate positions. Ho drew a strategic conclusion from an operational problem. A company of this size could not carry the capital and overhead of a global hotel owner and operator on its own.
Partners without loss of control: In December 2016 Banyan Tree Holdings agreed a long-term partnership with Accor. The French group invested for a stake of about 5% and undertook to co-develop Banyan Tree-branded hotels, and Banyan gained access to Accor’s reservations, sales and loyalty network. Ho presented the alliance as a way for a mid-sized, family-controlled group to stay independent while the industry consolidated. An Accor executive has sat on the board since 2017, and the two groups work together on hotels in the Middle East. In 2017 the company formed a joint venture with China Vanke to hold and expand its business in China, and Vanke took a similar stake in the listed company. In December 2023 Banyan agreed to buy back Vanke’s interests in the China hotel management ventures, consolidating its control of that business.
Managing more, owning less: The group calls its approach “asset-right”. It keeps ownership where it has deep roots, above all in Phuket, and grows elsewhere through management contracts that earn fees without tying up capital. Of the 25 hotels it added between the pandemic and mid-2023, it held equity in one. The 100th property illustrates the model. Mandai Rainforest Resort by Banyan Tree in Singapore is owned by Mandai Wildlife Group and managed by Banyan.
Residences as the earnings engine: Property development is unusual for a hotel brand, and it has become central to this one. Branded residences sold alongside the resorts generate cash faster than hotels do and fund further development. In fiscal 2025 (year ended December 2025) group revenue rose 25% to USD 371 million. Revenue from residences nearly doubled to USD 154 million, or 41% of the total, almost level with the owned hotels at 42%. Fees from managing hotels and related services made up the remaining 17%. The group reports that it is the largest developer of branded residences in Asia and the fifth largest globally by volume. Its largest project, Laguna Lakelands, was launched in 2024 beside Laguna Phuket and is planned to reach 5,000 to 6,000 homes with a value of about USD 2 billion on completion.
A structure to match: Ho has argued that the stock market struggles to value a company that is at once a hotel owner, a hotel manager and a property developer. In February 2024 he said he intended to separate hotel management and property development into distinct companies, called the task a priority for his own legacy, and said the group did not want to be acquired. “We want to be independent, but we also need to grow,” he said. In July 2026 he spoke of the restructuring as work in progress. Its final form had not been set out publicly as of October 2026.
Growth by acquisition: The second part of that statement was acted on in September 2026, when Banyan Group announced an agreement to acquire a majority stake in Newmark Hotels & Reserves, a Cape Town-based management company, under a phased structure that leads to full ownership. Newmark manages 26 hotels, lodges and reserves in seven African countries and will keep its name and leadership as what Banyan calls a collection brand. The deal marks a change of method. The group had added hotels one at a time, and here it acquires a portfolio of management contracts in a single step. Ho had signalled the move in December 2025, saying the group now had the depth of management to absorb such a business.
The lesson for leaders of mid-sized companies is that brand and balance sheet can be separated. Banyan Group kept what only it could do, which is to define the brands, design the experience and train the people. It shared or avoided what others could do with more capital. The cost of that choice is a more complex company, and that complexity is the reason for the restructuring.
The future strategy of the Banyan Tree Group is described as “to string a necklace of resorts around the world”. It’s not about being everywhere, but having a presence in chosen places. “It is not about quantity but building quality jewels that form a chain”, according to executive chairman Ho Kwon Ping. The company plans to expand the brand across new regions to create a truly global brand.
China became the largest single market. The group entered in 2005 with Banyan Tree Ringha in Yunnan, created from restored Tibetan farmhouses, and opened in Lijiang the following year. At the end of 2025 it operated 38 hotels and resorts in China under five brands, all of them managed for their owners.
The company focuses on growing the business through new management agreements and selective hotel and resort investment. With its vertically integrated business model, it takes development from greenfield to completion through wholly owned subsidiaries Architrave (design), GPS (project management) and Banyan Tree Hotels & Resorts (management).
The international strategy is also part of having more diverse revenue streams from separate regions and markets of the world. The leisure industry is volatile and Banyan Tree is hedging against unexpected events and cyclical economies by having hotel resorts in different locations.
Banyan Tree will continue to provide its unique blend of romance, rejuvenation and sensuality in multiple destinations across the globe as the lifestyle hospitality group expands further into the Middle East, Central America, Europe and Africa.
That expansion is now visible on the map. Japan has grown to eight hotels since 2022, led by Banyan Tree Higashiyama Kyoto, which opened in August 2024 with 52 rooms and an exterior designed by the architect Kengo Kuma. In the Middle East, the tented Banyan Tree AlUla opened in Saudi Arabia in 2022 and Banyan Tree Dubai followed in 2023. In Europe, the group began with Angsana Corfu in Greece and brought its flagship to the continent in July 2025 with Mamula Island by Banyan Tree in Montenegro. Mexico has five properties. In Africa, the group was present in Morocco and Mauritius before the Newmark agreement, with a first safari lodge planned in Tanzania’s Ruaha National Park.
The 100th property: The milestone of 100 hotels and resorts was reached in Singapore, where the group had never operated a hotel. Mandai Rainforest Resort by Banyan Tree opened in April 2025 and was inaugurated officially on 26 November 2025. It has 338 rooms, including 24 treehouses, within the Mandai Wildlife Reserve and overlooking a reservoir, and it is the first hotel in Singapore to receive the Green Mark Platinum Super Low Energy certification. Ho treated the occasion with characteristic understatement, as a moment to say “Phew, we survived to 100”. He has compared the group’s first decades to an antelope crossing a river full of crocodiles. Reaching 100 hotels was the far bank.
From scale to quality: What follows is a change of emphasis. In 2023 Ho spoke of 200 to 300 hotels within the career of the next generation. After the 100th opening he said that no such number would be a goal and that the group did not want to play a numbers game. At the end of 2025 the pipeline held 27 further hotels, including first properties in the Dominican Republic, Benin and Tanzania. The original image still applies. A necklace is judged by its stones, and the test of the coming decade is whether each new property adds to the brand or merely to the count.
Banyan Group is a listed company that has remained a family enterprise. How it has managed that combination is as instructive as its brand strategy.
Ownership: Banyan Tree Holdings listed on the Singapore Exchange in 2006. In the same year Ho turned down an offer from an American private equity firm to buy him out, a decision recorded in the 2024 book on his career. The family has remained the largest shareholder, with more than 40% of the company held largely through family holding companies. Qatar Investment Authority owns about a quarter and has been a substantial shareholder since at least 2010. The Ng family of Far East Organization is another substantial shareholder, and Accor remains a strategic partner. The value of patient shareholders showed in 2020, when travel stopped and the company launched a rights issue of convertible bonds. Ho and Qatar’s investment arm committed in advance to subscribe and to take up whatever other shareholders did not.
Board and management: The board has ten directors. Six are independent, including a lead independent director. Three are non-executive and non-independent: an Accor executive, a Qatar Investment Authority executive and Ho Ren Hua, the founders’ elder son. Ho Kwon Ping is the only executive director. Day-to-day leadership rests with Eddy See, President and Chief Executive Officer, a professional manager who joined the group in 2004. Claire Chiang is Senior Vice President and leads learning and talent development and business development in China. Ho Kwon Cjan, the founder’s brother, is Group Chief Architect.
The next generation: All three children of the founders hold roles in the family’s businesses. Ho Ren Hua led Banyan Tree’s operations in China before leaving in 2015 to become chief executive of Thai Wah, and has served on the Banyan board as a non-executive director since 2020. Ho Ren Yung joined the group in 2009, left for several years to found her own ventures, returned to lead brand and commercial functions, and was appointed Deputy Chief Executive Officer in August 2024. Ho Ren Chun, a former lawyer, is director of corporate development and has spoken of his work with the family office. Each took a different route, and each gained experience outside the parent company.
Ho Ren Yung has described the debates with her father over brand and business direction as “necessary and healthy”. Ho Ren Hua has recalled the advice that took him to Thai Wah: “If you want in the future to be a good chairman, you need to learn how to be a CEO.” In July 2026 Ho Kwon Ping said that, as part of the restructuring, his daughter would become chief executive of the hotel management company while he remained responsible for other parts of the group.
The founder’s principles: Ho has set out his thinking on succession in unusually direct terms. He separates ownership from management. Family members should hold senior management positions only if they want them and if outside stakeholders agree, and later generations need not manage the business at all. He regards the founder’s belief that no successor can match him as the hubris that destroys family companies. “Families should exist for the sake of the business, not the business exist for the sake of the family,” he said in 2026. Claire Chiang has given the family its time horizon. As her daughter relates it: “Better to be a 500-year-old company than a Fortune 500 company.”
These principles correspond to the distinct roles that family members can hold in an enterprise: owner, steward and operator. In the Ho family the roles are visibly separated. Ownership sits in holding companies. Stewardship is exercised at board level, alongside independent directors and long-term outside shareholders. Operating roles are held on merit, under a non-family chief executive. This is the discipline that multi-generational stewardship requires, and it rests on the family unity, harmony and cohesion without which no governance structure holds. The existence of a family office alongside the listed companies suggests that the family is also organising its ownership for the long term.
The transition is not complete, and no outsider should predict its outcome. Succession from a founder who has led a company since its first day is a governance question that every family enterprise faces. What can be said is that this family has prepared for it in public, over many years, with clear principles and tested successors.
Distinctively Asian versus developing a global image: As Banyan Tree has already expanded way beyond Asia where it started, the company faces the typical dilemma of any Asian brand to find a balance between being distinctively Asian and developing a more globally-oriented image. Though the entire brand is based on the unique Asian touch and cultural heritage, Banyan Tree has to constantly evaluate its relevance and sustainability carefully as it enters new territories. Generally, the Asian touch and feel that Banyan Tree provides to its customers is deemed both exotic and distinct in their properties outside Asia.
It can localise its offerings to suit the local tastes and environments better, but Banyan Tree should be sensible about the extent of localisation. If Banyan Tree were to keep localising its offerings, especially in Western markets, it might ultimately affect its core brand identity and drain it of its main differentiating factor – the unique Asian heritage. The group’s answer has been to make a strong sense of place the constant, expressed through local architecture, craft and materials in each destination, as in Kyoto and AlUla, while the service philosophy and wellbeing traditions remain recognisably its own.
Consequences of brand extensions: The Banyan Tree brand portfolio has increased comprising different business lines, target groups and price segments. This is a challenge which goes to the very foundation of the company – management of the brand and allocation of resources. Though Angsana has a lower price point and is targeted primarily towards family guests, these resorts still have much of the typical Banyan Tree feel. The challenge is to balance two distinct brands and differentiate them without diluting the leading brand Banyan Tree in particular. With the on-going company expansion, there will be a resource allocation trade-off sometime in the future.
That trade-off has arrived. With more than a dozen brands from luxury to midscale, the question has moved beyond whether Angsana resembles Banyan Tree. It is whether a guest in a midscale hotel forms a view of the flagship. The change of corporate name in 2024 was designed to protect the flagship from that association. Both Ho Kwon Ping and Ho Ren Yung have acknowledged internal friction when the midscale brands were launched, and the group has committed to renewing Banyan Tree itself through refreshed positioning, service and design. The priority is right, because every other brand in the portfolio borrows the flagship’s credibility.
The centralised marketing and branding team is overseeing resorts in different parts of the world, so successful management of the brand portfolio would be extremely challenging and requires stringent procedures and decisions for each of the brands in order to stay in touch with market dynamics.
Keep innovating and avoid copycats: The market is crowded with many entrants running similar branded resorts in the upper-end. Particularly in Asia Pacific, where Banyan Tree has its stronghold and traditional base, new entrants are facing only small barriers-of-entry other than huge capital requirements and availability of good locations. Something Asia is not short of. A new entrant can always try to copy the “romance-intimacy-rejuvenation” theme and replicate the serene locations with beautiful villas providing it at lower prices to gain foothold in the market. Ho himself has observed that the pool villa is now commonplace. Banyan Tree’s competitive set includes Asian-rooted luxury brands such as Aman, Six Senses, Anantara, Mandarin Oriental and Shangri-La, and beyond them the global hotel groups, whose loyalty programmes and distribution give them a reach that an independent company cannot match alone.
Therefore, Banyan Tree needs to keep innovating and exceeding customer expectations while staying true to its brand promise of providing a “Sanctuary for the Senses”. This requires substantial resources, management focus, and control of the brand portfolio to stay relevant and competitive.
Earnings concentration: The part of the business that carries the brand around the world contributes the least revenue. Management fees and related services accounted for 17% of revenue in fiscal 2025, while residences and owned hotels, both concentrated in Thailand, accounted for the rest. Residential sales follow property cycles. The strategic task is to grow fee income until the global management business can stand on its own.
Independence at scale: Staying independent now depends on continued growth, and growth by acquisition brings risks of its own. Newmark adds 26 properties with their own identities under a collection brand. Integrating them will show whether the group’s systems, culture and standards can absorb a business it did not build.
Founder transition: Ho Kwon Ping has been the public face and strategic mind of the group for more than 30 years. The restructuring, the new leadership roles and the next generation’s growing responsibilities all arrive together. The clarity with which roles are defined and communicated will matter to hotel owners and shareholders as much as to the group’s own people.
Climate resilience: Many of the group’s resorts stand on coasts, islands and other exposed sites. The shift from mitigation to adaptation that Ho has described will require investment in the physical resilience of properties, most of which the group manages and does not own. Persuading owners to make that investment is a new test of the brand’s authority.
As discussed above, Banyan Tree has managed to create a clear and well-defined brand position in the Asian luxury property market through its focus on branding and avoiding cost competition. Some of its key success factors include the following:
By combining the Asian culture and heritage with world-class service and luxury, Banyan Tree has been able to build a brand that has appealed to people across countries in Asia and beyond, and successfully been capitalising on the pan-Asian sentiment. Banyan Tree has successfully demonstrated that strong Asian brands can be created and sustained on a global basis. It is indeed a leading business case from Asia demonstrating the importance of strategic branding.
The verdict after three decades is that the founding thesis has held, and that it now faces a different test. A brand allowed a family business with no natural advantage to leave commodity competition behind, to survive crises that closed weaker operators, and to remain independent while admired peers were sold. That independence now depends on scale, and scale carries the risk that the brand becomes a label on a portfolio and stops being a promise to a guest.
Three things will decide the outcome. The first is whether the flagship keeps renewing itself. The second is whether the management business grows into a main source of earnings, so that the group is less exposed to a single property market. The third is governance: an orderly transfer from the founder to a structure in which family owners, an independent board and professional managers each know their role.
For leaders of family enterprises, the lesson reaches beyond hotels. Independence is a strategy with a cost. It has to be paid for with diversification, with partners who bring capital and reach without taking control, and with a family that puts the enterprise first. Claire Chiang’s ambition of a 500-year company sets the right test. On the evidence of its first three decades, Banyan Group has earned the right to attempt it.
About the author: Martin Roll – Global Family Business & Family Office Expert
Aman: Aman – The Strategy Behind The Iconic Asian Luxury Hospitality Brand
Mandarin Oriental: Mandarin Oriental – An Iconic Asian Luxury Hotel Brand
Shangri-La Hotels & Resorts: Shangri-La Hotels and Resorts – Bringing Asian Hospitality To The World
Singapore Airlines: Singapore Airlines – An Excellent, Iconic Asian Brand
Stewardship: The Stewardship Imperative: How to Build Multi-Generational Success in Family Business
The 3 Pillars of Success in Family Business: Family Unity, Harmony, and Cohesion
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