Chambers Global Practice Guides: Hotel Management & Transactions 2026

Our partners Gabriel E. Torres Escoto, Santiago Carrillo Cattori and Javier Domínguez Torrado, together with associate Carlos Riggen Castillo, contributed to the Mexico chapter of Chambers Global Practice Guides’ Hotel Management & Transactions 2026.

The chapter traces how Mexico’s hotel market has shifted, over five years, from operational recovery and pipeline growth into a market defined by the depth of its deal architecture: fewer but larger transactions, long-duration management agreements, and a contractual framework that increasingly sets the terms on which institutional capital can engage with the sector.

The Trends and Developments section examines four dimensions of this evolution:

•  The asset-light shift and its contractual footprint. The separation of real estate ownership from brand, management and distribution functions has arrived in Mexico with force, among global chains and domestic operators alike, preserving operational control contractually long after the real estate has been deconsolidated.
• What hotel management agreements actually look like. Instruments running 20 to 30 years, extendable to 40 or more, that survive every change of ownership, every refinancing and virtually every corporate reorganization with key concepts such as fee architecture, Key Money, Areas of Protection, USALI and its reconciliation against Mexican NIF, the Performance Test as the owner’s principal exit valve, transfer restrictions, and a dual dispute-resolution mechanism combining expert determination with ICC arbitration.
• A diversifying operator landscape. The arrival of independent and experiential luxury operators, the scaling of Mexican operators into the high-end segment, re-flagging and brand repositioning as M&A strategies, and an observable shift toward Mexican substantive law in management agreements, while retaining ICC arbitration seated in a neutral jurisdiction.
• The transactional window opening through 2027 and 2028. Driven by the maturing hold periods of foreign institutional capital deployed in the sector between 2017 and 2020, with the particularity that buyers are acquiring not only the asset but the operational architecture attached to it.

The chapter’s central point is that hotel management agreements are the invisible infrastructure of every hotel asset in Mexico: they determine what a buyer inherits, what an operator retains, and how lenders are protected.

We invite you to read the full article for more information on this topic.