ARNE SORENSON, PRESIDENT AND CEO OF MARRIOTT INTERNATIONAL, TALKS TO TOM OTLEY
Our customers like to have the options... if anything, they are telling us to get bigger, to have more brands
BY THE END OF 2015, Marriott will have over one million rooms operational or in the pipeline. Arne Sorenson, president and CEO of Marriott Interna- tional, is adamant that the hotel chain’s unprecedented expansion over recent years is of benefit to everyone – not just Marriott’s shareholders. “You have three distinct audiences – Marriott, our hotel guests, and our owners,” he says. “The advantages from the expansion to Marriott are reasonably clear: the bigger we get, the more money we make and the more people are aware of our brands.” From the guest point of view, he says, it’s all about the brands. “We have long thought that we are best as we have a leading brand in each segment of the marketplace. That started in the 1980s, when we added Courtyard, Residence Inn and Fairfield, then added Ritz-Carlton in the 1990s. More recently, we’ve added five or six brands in the last five or six years.” These brands, he says, need to stand for something, so the customer can think of them as an articulation of what to expect from their hotel of choice. “The traveller will say: ‘I can look quickly and see whether Marriott has something that I’m inter- ested in. I can see if there’s a Ritz-Carlton, because I know that brand and have a sense of where the pricing is.’ So the guest is advantaged by this.” As for the owners, Sorenson stresses the importance of getting the right balance between what the brand stands for, and leaving enough flexibility for the people running the hotels to influence what happens in each property. But can you have too many brands?
“We’re not trying to confuse people,” says Sorenson. “Each brand has its own website for travellers to do their research, but they are also all on
Marriott.com.
30 BBT MAY/JUNE 2015
ARNE SORENSON is president and CEO of Marriott International. He was elected to Marriott International’s board of directors in 2011. He also serves on the board of directors for Brand USA and Luther College, Iowa, and is a member of President Obama’s Export Council.
He is chairman of Marriott’s Global Diversity and Inclusion Council, and on the Marriott Board of Directors’ Committee for Excellence, a board subcommittee focused on diversity.
to book through our direct channels to get a qualifying rate. We want to deliver value to customers who are coming to us direct.” He adds: “If you are a meaningful corpo-
rate customer, if we have a corporate rate with you, which will often be the case, it will be reasonably clear that your employees are going to get free wifi.”
“Our customers like to have the options,
and our owners like to be able to grow. Of the 100,000 rooms we signed last year, overwhelmingly, that has nothing to do with our capital – it’s developers who are coming forward and, if anything, our customers are telling us to get bigger, to have more brands.” It is a philosophy, he says, of, “let us grow with you, whether as a guest or a hotel owner”.
ANTI-CORPORATE? Recently there have been murmurings of discontent within the business travel industry regarding Marriott’s offer that allows its Rewards members to gain access to free wifi, but only if they book direct through the hotel group’s channels. The Institute of Travel and Meetings, for example, has described the decision as an “anti-corporate initiative” and said it encourages travellers to book out of policy. Sorenson says this is not the case. “People are just confused,” he says. “As of
January 15 we now offer free wifi to Mar- riott Rewards members [but] they do need
MUTUAL BENEFIT For quite a while in Asia, if you checked into a Marriott hotel, wifi was immedi- ately free if you signed up to Rewards, and Sorenson says that as, a land-grab for new members, this “worked wonder- fully”. However, he is keen to stress that, again, this policy is of mutual benefit to the customer as well as to Marriott. “If we have the ability to pull in tens of millions of new customers that we can market to, we can reach out and say: ‘Here’s a special where you like to stay.’ Or: ‘We haven’t seen you in a while – here’s something to tempt you back.’” But some might say the more people in the programme, the less value it will have – that is, the more people check in via the scheme, there will be less room for manoeuvre when it comes to offer- ing upgrades. Here, Sorenson counters by returning to the subject of Marriott’s continuing expansion. “As long as we’re growing our portfolio significantly as well, we grow the opportu- nities for people to earn and redeem points. But we need to make sure we are satisfying people, and they are getting value when they stay. For the wifi, in many markets it’s a free basic level and the higher levels [of wifi] are either going to be reserved for people who pay for it or for our elite customers – our Marriott Rewards Gold and Elite will get more benefits because of their loyalty to us.”
BUYINGBUSINESSTRAVEL.COM
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