Marriott International, Inc. (Maryland) : The largest hotel chain in the United States

Marriott International is the largest hotel chain in the world. It has 30 brands with 7,003 properties in 131 countries and territories around the world, over 1,332,826 rooms (as of March 31, 2019), including 2,035 that are managed with 559,569 rooms, 4,905 that are franchised or licensed with 756,156 rooms, and 63 that are owned or leased with 17,101 rooms, plus an additional 475,000 rooms in the development pipeline and an additional 25,000 rooms approved for development but not yet under signed contracts.

It is headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland, in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. In 2017, Marriott was ranked #33 on Fortune's "100 Best Companies to Work For" list, its twentieth appearance on the list.

Marriott was founded by John Willard Marriott in 1927 when he and his wife, Alice Sheets Marriott, opened a root beer stand in Washington, D.C. As a Latter-day Saint missionary in the humid summers in Washington, D.C., Marriott was convinced that what residents of the city needed was a place to get a cool drink. The Marriotts later expanded their enterprise into a chain of Hot Shoppes restaurants and the company went public in 1953 as Hot Shoppes, Inc.

The company opened its first hotel, the Twin Bridges Marriott Motor Hotel, in Arlington, Virginia, in 1957. Their second hotel, the Key Bridge Marriott in the Rosslyn neighborhood of the same city, is Marriott International's longest continuously operating hotel and celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2009. Their son, J. W. (Bill) Marriott, Jr., led the company to spectacular worldwide growth during his more than 50-year career. In March 2012, at age 80, he turned the CEO responsibilities over to Arne Sorenson, while he assumed the title of executive chairman.

Hot Shoppes, Inc. was renamed the Marriott Corporation in 1967.

The company opened two theme parks in 1976. One Marriott's Great America was located outside Chicago; the other Marriott's Great America was located outside San Francisco. Marriott sold both properties in 1984.

According to wikipedia