Marriott put in four months of work organizing and keeping under wraps its merger with Starwood—and will now have to walk away from all of that effort, or make some sacrifices.
“The time and energy they’ve invested is not something they’re going to happily walk away from,” says Tom Baker, corporate managing director at commercial real estate services firm Savills Studley.
Anbang Insurance's latest $14B offer beats out Marriott’s last bid ($13.6B), and the hotel giant is out of options—it can either sit back and hope Anbang’s offer makes the merger too financially risky, or somehow come up with more money, Bloomberg reports.
“I don’t think there is a better way to make this work, unless Marriott arranged the concurrent sale of the real estate for a very high price,” says David Loeb, an analyst at Robert W. Baird. [Bloomberg]
