How Barceló got here
Barceló did not start with a hotel. It started with a bus. In 1931 Simón Barceló ran one vehicle between the villages of Mallorca and Palma, carrying passengers one way and freight the other, and everything below is what that turned into.
Founded 1931 · Felanitx, Mallorca, Spain · Last reviewed August 2026
- 1931
Sa camiona
Simón Barceló founds a small transport company in Felanitx, Mallorca. Its first vehicle is known affectionately as sa camiona, roughly “the truck” in Mallorcan Catalan, and it runs passengers and merchandise between the rural villages and Palma. His sons Sebastián and Gabriel work in the business from early on, and as Mallorca starts drawing foreign visitors they spot that carrying tourists could be a bigger business than carrying anyone else.
- 1954
Selling the trip, not just the ride
Barceló moves into travel agencies, which puts more of a holiday under one roof: sell the trip, arrange the transport, and eventually provide the bed at the other end.
- 1962
The first hotel
The hotel division starts with the purchase of the Hotel Latino in Palma de Mallorca. Worth keeping straight: the group dates to 1931, but Barceló as a hotel company is slightly younger than RIU, which bought its first hotel in 1953.
- 1965
The holiday village
Barceló Pueblo Palma opens, one of Spain's early holiday-village concepts. Instead of a city-style tower, the Pueblo model is low-rise buildings, landscaped grounds, entertainment, activities and a lot of family services at a price ordinary people could pay. Pueblo is Spanish for village, and the format is repeated in Ibiza and Benidorm. Much of what a large all-inclusive resort looks like today starts here.
- 1970
Off the islands
Barceló Pueblo Benidorm takes the company to mainland Spain for the first time.
- 1985
The bet on Punta Cana
The Barceló Bávaro Beach Resort opens, and the company describes itself as the first Spanish hotel chain to open in the Caribbean. Punta Cana at the time was nothing like the destination it became, which is what makes this the biggest gamble in the story. The complex grew into a destination of its own: several hotels, large convention facilities, thousands of rooms, and much of the Bávaro market that followed.
- 1992
Into the United States
Barceló buys properties in Washington, D.C. and Orlando, which the company says made it the first Spanish hotel group to operate in the United States.
- 2002
Crestline
Barceló acquires Crestline Capital, a North American operator running close to 7,000 rooms across 12 states. The ownership arrangement changes more than once over the years that follow.
- 2013
An airline again
The travel division launches Evelop Airlines for leisure flights to the Caribbean. Evelop later folds into Iberojet, run through Barceló's Ávoris travel arm. Eighty years after one bus, the family is moving people by air.
- 2016
Four brands
The hotels are reorganised into Royal Hideaway for luxury, Barceló for upper-upscale resorts and city hotels, Occidental for upscale and more widely accessible properties, and Allegro for casual, value-led resorts. The Royal Hideaway name came in through Barceló's relationship with Occidental Hotels; the best-known of them, Royal Hideaway Playacar in Mexico, was one of the earlier adults-oriented luxury all-inclusives in the region.
- 2017
All of Crestline back
Barceló reacquires 100% of Crestline Hotels & Resorts.
What the dates leave out
The Barceló hotels that are not called Barceló
Crestline manages hotels flying other people's flags, among them Marriott, Hilton, Hyatt and IHG. So a good number of American hotels connected to Barceló carry no Barceló branding at all, which makes the group considerably larger in the United States than its name suggests.
The billion spent on not expanding
Through the financial crisis Barceló made an unfashionable choice. Rather than keep adding hotels, it slowed down and reportedly put about a billion euros over seven years into renovating the ones it already had.
A space station above a railway station
Barceló Sants in Barcelona sits on top of the city's Sants station and was renovated to a full space-station theme: orbital corridors, futuristic signage, rooms dressed as though you are aboard a spacecraft. The Barceló Emperatriz in Madrid was put together differently again, with prospective guests using a website and social media to help pick services, furnishings and finishes before it opened.
The Mallorca cluster
Barceló is one of four major hotel companies founded by families on the same island. RIU bought its first hotel on Playa de Palma in 1953, the Fluxà family behind Iberostar had been in Mallorca since 1877 making shoes, Barceló started in 1931 with a single bus in Felanitx, and Gabriel Escarrer leased his first Palma hotel in 1956 and built Meliá. A single Mediterranean island produced a remarkable share of the companies that now run the Caribbean's all-inclusive resorts. A fifth Spanish group, Grupo Piñero, reached the same island from the other direction: founded in Murcia, made its name with a hotel in the Dominican Republic, and now runs Bahia Principe out of Palma.
Where it ended up
More than 300 hotels and roughly 66,000 rooms across 30 countries, counting both the hotels Barceló runs directly and those managed through affiliated operations. Still a privately held family business, now in the hands of later generations of the same family.
Everything we read on Barceló
Where the company's own materials disagree with each other, we print both readings rather than choosing the tidier one.