Financial Information
Development
We added 311 properties, totaling 46,050 rooms, across our brands in 2014, and 52 properties (6,418 rooms) left the system, not including residential products. We also added two residential properties (30 units) and no residential properties left the system. Highlights of the year included:
- Converting 32 properties (8,885 rooms), or 19 percent of our gross room additions for the year, to our brands;
- Adding approximately 60 percent of all the new rooms outside the United States; and
- Adding 120 properties (13,928 rooms) to our North American Limited-Service brands.
We have nearly 240,000 hotel rooms in our development pipeline as of year-end 2014, which includes hotel rooms under construction and under signed contracts, as well as nearly 30,000 hotel rooms approved for development but not yet under signed contracts. We expect the number of our hotel rooms (gross) to increase approximately 7 percent in 2015.
We believe that we have access to sufficient financial resources to finance our growth, as well as to support our ongoing operations and meet debt service and other cash requirements. Nonetheless, our ability to develop and update our brands and the ability of hotel developers to build or acquire new Marriott-branded properties, both of which are important parts of our growth plan, depend in part on capital access, availability and cost for other hotel developers and third-party owners. These growth plans are subject to numerous risks and uncertainties, many of which are outside of our control. See the “Forward-Looking Statements” and “Risks and Uncertainties” captions earlier in this report and the “Liquidity and Capital Resources” caption later in this report.