While that can be true, some get a fair amount of money out of their owned (or ones they actively manage) properties. Franchisees are quite important and contribute a lot in fees (lots of fees...) as you point out but don't discount the still owned properties, many of which are significant buildings by themselves.

Expand, please.

The hotel business has the separate concepts of "operator" and "owner". The operator is the brand you know. The owner is some property ownership company that contracted a particular operator to build and run their property. The branding is so thorough that you generally don't see any indication of the actual owner, except in the rare cases where a property changes brands.

Just take a look at this list of the top 25 hotel owners: http://nreionline.com/research/real_estate_top_hotel_owners_...

A few are the brands themselves, since they are the owner/operator for some properties. But many are companies you have never heard of that own hundreds of hotels.

Interesting, I only heard of 1 of out of those companies previously.