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.