Hotels & Leisure

What others say about us

"The cross-departmental hotels team receives consistent praise from clients."
 (Legal 500)

"The firm offers a dedicated hotels practice, fielding lawyers with prodigious industry knowledge and experience across a swathe of disciplines."
 (Chambers Guide to the Legal Profession)

Real estate

• Operator agreements, especially leases, tenancy agreements and management agreements
• New hotel developments, including construction law issues
• Advice on renovating existing hotel complexes
• Sale of hotel sites
• Structuring sale-and-leaseback and sale-and-manage-back agreements

Corporate law

• Structuring investment in hotel companies
• Acquisition, including review with regard to competition issues, restructuring and establishment of companies

Financing

• Tailored financing agreements
• Creation of liens and collateralisation of other assets plus cross-collateralisation

Tax law

• Optimisation of deal structures, e.g. to save property transfer tax or benefit from investment subsidies

Employment law

• Transaction-related issues, restructuring and personnel measures
• Collective employment law, company pension schemes

Distribution and trademark law

• Franchise and licensing agreements
• Rebranding

Focus

CMS is one of the few top law firms with its own workgroup for the hotel industry. The CMS hotels group brings together partners and associates from the Corporate, Real Estate, Construction, Employment, Tax and Finance practices. We also involve colleagues from other areas of law if required to provide you with legal advice from a single source. We offer pragmatic solutions and a high degree of efficiency thanks to the ongoing commitment of our partners on behalf of their clients, combined with interdisciplinary teams tailored to customer needs.

In more than 15 years of advising the hotel industry, we have amassed a wealth of in-depth specialist expertise. Our partners have long been familiar with the major investors and operators in the market, some of them on a personal level. We advise owners, project developers, operators, purchasers and financing banks on all legal issues relevant to the hotel sector. An extensive track record is testimony to our accumulated expertise. This industry knowledge and experience is our key strength.

At European level, the CMS hotels group works extremely efficiently and successfully with other CMS law firms. If necessary, we include these foreign legal system experts in the team. The hotels group has seamlessly cooperated across national borders on a large number of international transactions. A central contact person coordinates team members across the various firms. The CMS hotels group is a leader in the European hotel industry and its roster of clients includes eight of the ten largest hotels groups in Europe.