Sheraton Hotels and Resorts is an American international hotel chain owned by Marriott International. As of June 30, 2020, Sheraton operates 446 hotels with 155,617 rooms globally, including locations in North America, Africa, Asia-Pacific, Central and South America, Europe, the Middle East and the Caribbean, in addition to 84 hotels with 23,092 rooms in the pipeline.

The origins of Sheraton Hotels date to 1933, when Harvard classmates Ernest Henderson and Robert Moore purchased the Continental Hotel in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

In 1937, Henderson and Moore purchased the Standard Investing Corporation and the International Equities Corporation, combining them into the Standard Equities Corporation, the company through which they would run their hotels. Also in 1937, they purchased their second hotel, and the first as part of the new company, the Stonehaven Hotel in Springfield, Massachusetts, a converted apartment building. Sheraton dates its founding to that year and considers that property its first hotel.

The chain got its name from the third hotel the pair acquired, in Boston, in 1939. It had a large lighted sign on the roof saying "Hotel Sheraton," which was too expensive to change. Instead, Henderson and Moore decided to call all of their hotels by that name. The original name was probably a reference to furniture designer Thomas Sheraton.

Henderson and Moore purchased Boston's famed Copley Plaza Hotel in 1941, and continued expanding rapidly, buying existing properties along the East Coast from Maine to Florida.

In 1946, the Standard Equities Corporation merged with the United States Realty and Improvement Corporation, forming the Sheraton Corporation of America, which became the first hotel chain to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1947.

In 1949, Sheraton expanded internationally, buying the Ford Hotels chain, with three properties in Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal. They quickly resold the Toronto and Ottawa properties to finance their continued Canadian expansion in 1950, paying $4.8 million to purchase Cardy Hotels, a chain of six properties in Ontario and Quebec. In April 1951, the Park Sheraton Hotel in New York City would host the 1951 NBA draft, which was the second ever draft under the NBA name and fifth overall NBA draft in existence by that time.

In 1956, Sheraton paid $30 million to buy the Eppley Hotel Company, which was then the largest privately held hotel business in the United States, with 22 properties across six Midwestern states. Sheraton retained ten of the largest hotels and immediately resold the other twelve. That same year, Sheraton acquired its first motels, purchasing two properties in the suburbs of Syracuse, New York. In 1957, Sheraton, which had previously focused on acquiring existing hotels, opened its first newly built hotel, the Philadelphia Sheraton Hotel. In 1958, Sheraton became the first hotel chain to centralize and computerize its reservations when it introduced Reservatron, the hotel industry's first automatic electronic reservations system.