Most owners who want to sell to Hyatt go looking for a "vendor application" on hyatt.com and come up empty. That's because Hyatt, like most large hotel companies, doesn't run a single public buying portal where you fill out a form and wait for a purchase order. Its buying is split across a corporate procurement team, a group purchasing organization that serves thousands of properties, and individual hotels making local decisions.
If you understand how those three layers work, you can get in front of the right buyer instead of shouting into a contact form. Here's the map, and where your diversity certification actually moves you forward.
The three ways Hyatt buys1. Through Avendra, the group purchasing org. Hyatt co-founded Avendra in 2001 with Marriott, Fairmont, IHG, and ClubCorp. Aramark bought Avendra in 2017, and it's now one of the largest hospitality purchasing organizations in North America, sourcing for roughly 21,000 properties. A single Avendra contract can put your product into thousands of hotels at once. The tradeoff is a long, selective approval process, often six to nine months, and applications tend to stall without an anchor hotel customer already asking for you. Avendra doesn't charge suppliers a fee to participate; group purchasing orgs make money on the volume contracts they negotiate with hotels, not on vendors buying their way in.
2. Through Hyatt's corporate procurement and diverse supplier registration. This is where the supplier diversity program lives, and where a certified business should start. Hyatt manages diverse supplier sourcing through Supplier.io (formerly CVM Solutions), a supplier intelligence platform. The public entry point is hyatt.supplierone.co, a SupplierOne registration page where any business can self-register, build a profile, upload certifications, and become discoverable to Hyatt buyers.
3. At the property level. A single Hyatt hotel or regional cluster buys plenty on its own: local food and beverage, services, maintenance, event supplies. General managers and on-property purchasing leads have real spending authority. A registered, certified profile plus a direct relationship at a nearby property is often the fastest first dollar.
Where to actually registerStart at hyatt.supplierone.co. SupplierOne is built on Supplier.io, the platform Hyatt uses to find and verify diverse suppliers. Registration is free. Create your company profile, list what you sell, and attach your certifications so they can be verified inside the system.
This matters because Hyatt enabled its properties to search Supplier.io's database of more than two million suppliers and roughly four million certifications, filtered by location, company size, product category, and diversity status. When a Hyatt buyer runs a search for, say, a certified woman-owned linen supplier within 50 miles of a property, you want to be in that result set with a complete, verified profile. An empty or unverified profile doesn't show up the way a complete one does.
After you register on SupplierOne, treat Avendra as the second track for any category where you'd serve many properties at scale. And work the property level in parallel; a GM who wants your product gives you the anchor customer Avendra approval usually needs.
What "diverse supplier" means to HyattHyatt's program follows the standard corporate definition: a business at least 51% owned, operated, and controlled by individuals in a recognized diverse group. In practice that covers:
- Minority-owned (MBE), certified through the National Minority Supplier Development Council (NMSDC) and its regional affiliates
- Women-owned (WBE), certified through the Women's Business Enterprise National Council (WBENC)
- LGBT-owned (LGBTBE), certified through the National LGBT Chamber of Commerce (NGLCC)
- Veteran and service-disabled veteran-owned, certified through NaVOBA or the federal SBA process
- Disability-owned (DOBE), certified through Disability:IN
- Small business, including SBA small-business status
Hyatt buyers look for third-party certification, not a self-declaration. A national certification is the credential that gets your profile flagged as verified and surfaces you in buyer searches. If you only hold a state or city certification, get it, but plan to add the national equivalent, because corporate programs lean on the national bodies.
If you're weighing which certifications to pursue and don't want to file with each council separately, CertifyAll compiles your documents once and handles the filings, so you end up with the credentials a buyer like Hyatt is searching for.
Tier 1 versus Tier 2, and why it matters to youWhen Hyatt buys directly from your certified business, that's Tier 1 spend. When one of Hyatt's large prime suppliers buys from you and reports it, that's Tier 2. Big hotel companies count both toward their diverse-spend numbers, which means a second route exists: become a certified subcontractor to one of Hyatt's existing prime vendors.
That's worth knowing if a direct Hyatt contract feels far off. A national prime supplier that already holds a Hyatt or Avendra contract often needs certified subcontractors to meet its own reporting commitments. Getting on a prime's roster can be faster than landing a direct corporate contract, and it builds the hospitality references you'll need later. Ask the primes in your category whether they run a Tier 2 program; many publish their own diverse-supplier registration.
What Hyatt's track record tells youThe program isn't decorative. Hyatt set a five-year goal to grow diverse supplier spend to 25% of total and reportedly hit it in three. It added more than 500 Black-owned suppliers between 2020 and 2022, and by the end of 2022 Black-owned businesses accounted for 34% of its diverse and women-owned supplier spend. Hyatt and Supplier.io shared a 2023 Supply & Demand Chain Executive Top Supply Chain Projects award for the work.
A short note on naming. Hyatt has housed these commitments under its "World of Care" framework, with earlier targets branded "Change Starts Here." Through 2025 and into 2026, a number of large companies have renamed, restructured, or quieted their public DEI language, and supplier inclusion language has shifted with it. The buying behavior tends to outlast the branding: hotels still need reliable, certified, competitively priced suppliers, and supplier diversity remains a real procurement function even where the marketing copy changed. Confirm the current program name on Hyatt's site before you cite one, and don't let a renamed page convince you the door is closed.
The realistic on-rampSelling to a company that runs 1,300-plus properties is a relationship business, not a form submission. A path that works:
- Get your national certification in hand. Without it you're an ordinary vendor competing on price alone. With it you show up in the diverse-supplier searches Hyatt buyers actually run.
- Register on hyatt.supplierone.co and complete the profile fully. Verified certifications, clear product categories, accurate location. Half-finished profiles don't surface.
- Build a capability statement and references that fit hospitality. Hotels buy linens, FF&E, food and beverage, cleaning, signage, tech, security, staffing. Speak to the category you actually serve and show you can hold quality across many sites.
- Win a property or regional relationship first. A single GM saying "I want this vendor" is the anchor that moves a corporate or Avendra conversation. Start near you.
- Pursue Avendra for scale categories. Once you can serve many properties and have a reference, apply to the GPO that already supplies thousands of hotels. Budget six to nine months.
Hyatt buys through Avendra, which also sources for Marriott, IHG, and Fairmont. The certification and capability statement you build for Hyatt are the same credentials those programs search on, which is the real return on getting certified: one credential, many corporate doors. Our corporate program directory lists Fortune 500 and large-enterprise supplier diversity programs with their certification requirements, so you can target the ones that buy what you sell instead of applying blind.
If you want buyers to find you, list your business in our supplier directory too, and read our broader guide on how to get into corporate supplier diversity programs for the parts that apply across every company, not just Hyatt.
The form on hyatt.com was never the way in. A national certification, a complete SupplierOne profile, and one property relationship are.
