Pritzker family plans IPO of Hyatt Hotels

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Hyatt Hotels Corp. wants to make a second run as a publicly traded firm: The Chicago company on Wednesday filed for an initial public stock offering, hoping to raise as much as $1.15 billion.

An IPO could be another big payday for Goldman Sachs Group: The investment bank took a 7.5% stake in the firm in 2007. The Pritzker family, which founded the hotel chain in 1957, owns most of the rest of the business.

As of June 30 the company owned, managed or franchised 413 hotels worldwide, encompassing about 120,000 rooms.

Hyatt earned $168 million in 2008 on sales of $3.8 billion. Revenue had risen from $2.7 billion in 2004. But business has plunged this year with the recession. Sales in the first six months tumbled more than 18% from the same period in 2008, to $1.6 billion.

A stock offering could give the Pritzkers a load of capital to use to acquire choice properties as the recession forces industry consolidation. It also could give family members another way to convert their hard-asset wealth into fast cash.

The deal would involve the sale of Class A shares, which would have one-tenth the voting power of the Class B shares retained by the Pritzkers. So the family would remain very much in control of their empire.

The company didn’t specify the number of shares it hoped to sell, or give an expected price range. The IPO would be handled by Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank Securities and JPMorgan.

Hyatt had been a publicly traded firm from 1962 until the Pritzkers took it private again in 1979. The family’s international hotel operations were in a separate public company from 1968 to 1982.

The company hopes to trade on the New York Stock Exchange under one of the few remaining single-letter ticker symbols: H, of course.

-- Tom Petruno