The Hotelling transform is based on statistical properties of an image. The principal uses of this transform are in data compression. The basic concept of the Hotelling transform is that the choice of basis vectors pointing the direction of maximum variance of the data. This property can be used for rotation normalization. Many objects of interest in pattern recognition applications can be easily standardized by performing a rotation normalization that aligns the coordinate axes with the axes of maximum variance of the pixels in the object. However, this transform can not be used to rotation normalization of color images directly. In this paper, we propose a new method for rotation normalization of color images based on the Hotelling transform. The Hotelling transform is performed to calculate basis vectors of each channel. Then the summation of vectors of all channels are processed. Rotation normalization is performed using the result of summation of vectors. Experimental results showed the proposed method can be used for rotation normalization of color images effectively.