What would Bill do?

Marriott is one of the most powerful hotel companies in the world, but it has made it to the top through learning from its mistakes and nurturing the values of its founder. Jamie Knights discovers it’s a formidable mix that is going from strength to strength.

They don’t get much bigger than Marriott. One of the largest hotel companies in the world, the number of hotels (more than 3600), employees (129,000) and brands (16 excluding vacation ownership and its golf brand) under its umbrella is exceptional, and growth is not stopping.

But when I have the opportunity to talk with the president and managing director of international lodging for Marriott, Ed Fuller, it becomes clear that rather than a soulless corporate behemoth, Marriott is a gentle giant, full of values, ideals and heart.

While this may sound glib, the sense of the values installed in the company by founder J.W Marriott and then developed by chairman and CEO Bill Marriott Jr., is palpable.

Fuller, who joined the company in 1972 and became head of international lodging in 1990, has overseen the business grow from 16 properties outside the US and Canada to 350 hotels in 70 countries with another 175 hotels under construction.

And while the Marriott machine keeps rolling out hotels, the day-to-day operations and decisions come down to a simple question for Fuller — “What would Bill do?”.

“The values transcend all our brands,” Fuller explains.

“I had the CEO of one of our major competitors say ‘you know the problem with my company is we don’t have the values that Bill Marriott has instilled, nor the structure where the people have reinforced those values all the way down the system’.”

While Fuller acknowledges the system is never perfect, he says his counterpart in the other company was making it a mission in the next three years to instill and develop those values in his company.

“This has been going on with Marriott for many years. These values have been developed over a long period of time and I would encourage anyone who is starting a business to make sure they develop their values and try and live them,” Fuller asserts.

“But if you don’t have a structure of people who are willing to buy into them [the values] and live them, then you can never do that.”

In an effort to ensure people do buy into the values of the company, Marriott conducts employee surveys every year and the results effect bonuses right through the management chain, even Bill Marriott Jr’s.

Regional challenges
While it is easier to create values when things are going your way, what happens when a crisis arises?

No matter how much experience you have, an unexpected event, whether a natural disaster or an uprising, can rock the boat, as recent turmoil in the region has proven.

“This year was really a surprise to me as to what we would face,” Fuller says while discussing the unrest.

“You never know what will happen, so that is why we have crisis management as part of leadership.”

Fuller describes having to charter planes to fly into Egypt in February, while employees defended one hotel with knives and brooms.

In Libya, a plane was chartered to fly out employees, and despite taking seven and a half hours to get the evacuees boarded due to the crush at the airport, Marriott managed to repatriate all the staff and guests.

“We got all 185 staff out and the last two guests on the plane to Jordan and redistributed them to their home countries,” Fuller explains.

“Eighty five percent of those people have been reassigned to other Marriotts and we are working on the last 15% right now. The hotel is not closed, it’s suspended and we have security around the hotel, with the hotel maintenance team in there keeping the engines running, but it’s closed to guests.

I hope it will reopen, but right now there are a lot of issues that I can’t anticipate. American law constrains us from doing anything during this time.”

Fuller certainly likes to lead from the front and he stresses the importance of showing employees, guests and owners that you are with them in a crisis and supporting them.

“I was in Cairo last weekend [April] to spend time with owners and it was important for them to see us on the ground, so they say ‘you see Marriott’s here’ — I’m not Bill Marriott, but I am Marriott to them,” he says.

And while the symbolic importance of walking with the security detail shows that the management regards it as important, upper management showing their faces goes beyond responding in times of crisis.

“For the hotel side, when I inspect freezers for the dates on food, I’m not there to catch them, I’m there to show that someone is looking,” he says.

Learning from mistakes
In Fuller’s new book You can’t Lead with your Feet on the Desk, he describes a time when Bill Marriott Jr. visited a hotel where he was a GM at the time. To Fuller’s dismay, his boss ordered a burger that was bad, something he never let him forget.

And it’s not a case of picking on someone for the sake of it; Fuller explains it was a lesson in paying attention to the details and understanding that everyone needs to know the importance of learning from their mistakes — something the company has been doing since day one.

“When we started we built the JW Marriott Hong Kong and we did not have the knowledge we have today,” he says.

“We had the executive lounge way too small — we did not understand the pulse of the market and we have since had to make major modifications to make it competitive.”

Due to such learning experiences, the company is doing better market research and spending more time on the decisions to enter new products into the market.

“The rules change from country to country so that is just one of the golden rules we have learned and that comes to how you treat people.

We learned that we really have to adapt and understand the markets in depth about 20 years ago, but we learned the hard way by making a mistake or two along the road. We are pretty darn good at it right now and it’s fun to watch our competitors make some of those same mistakes,” he says.

“And I am sure some of the old timers in the market were smiling when we made the mistakes.”

Regional Expansion
Marriott is currently evaluating the Fairfield Inn & Suites brand for the region and is looking at how the first Residence Inn in Bahrain is received.

But while the company has learned to spend more time on analysis, it hasn’t led to a slowdown in terms of intent when it comes to new brands.

Global officer sales and revenue management, Marriott, Stephanie Linnartz, says new brand launches that include Edition, Autograph and AC by Marriott are “going great”.

“We are in a joint venture with AC Hotels, which has 90 hotels primarily in Spain, but also in Portugal and Italy. It’s the early days of the JV, but so far it’s been fantastic.”

And while AC Hotels obviously benefits from the powerful machine of Marriott, Marriott in turn now has far greater access to new markets.

“With Spain, Italy and Portugal we didn’t have a lot of distribution, so it’s [put] the Marriott name into those markets, very quickly increasing our size in Europe,” she says.

“In terms of growth in Europe, we have roughly 40,000 rooms with the goal in the next five years to double it and this acquisition gets us about a quarter of the way there — it helps with our growth goals, it helps build the Marriott brand and it’s great for AC as they get the power of our distribution channels and sales team.”

Marriott vice president — global sales, Middle East and Africa, Vladimir Dabbah calls The Autograph Collection the “anti-brand”.

Linnartz confirms it’s a collection of hotels that have “their own strong independent sense of self”.

They range from everything from 15-room hunting lodges all the way up to the Cosmopolitan, a 3000-room Vegas giant.

Marriott is also in partnership with legendary hotelier Ian Schrager, a combination that has resulted in the Edition brand. While only two properties are online (in Waikiki and Istanbul), it is another brand that fills a niche in the Marriott family.

Brands’ finest hour?
The economic crisis hit some hotels harder than others, but it was the independents, generally speaking, that received the brunt of the storm as brands used the shelter of powerful marketing and booking tools.

“Brands are more powerful than ever, absolutely,” asserts Linnartz.
“Brands do better in a downturn. Whether it’s distribution, reaching existing customers, the Marriott rewards programme, online distribution, our owners can plug into that,” Dabbah adds.

Furthermore, properties benefit from the cross-selling capabilities of the Marriott sales force, service centre and online booking tools.

“This is the power of working with a company like Marriott. The sales associates can present the customer with a solution,” he says.

“Customers want to be sure that whatever channel they choose to book through they are guaranteed to get the best rate,” Dabbah explains.

“That’s something Marriott does a great job of; we have a transparency across all of our channels, whether you are going direct to the hotel, the website or the intermediary.”

Ultimately, the aim is for Marriott to provide a property for every type of guest in every location they need.

This is going to require a great deal of work and effort, but as Linnartz says, “Marriott is a growth company”.

“There are a lot of exciting years ahead of us in opening new hotels, continuing to improve performance and I think it’s an exciting journey ahead of us as a company,” she adds.

It’s comforting to know for customers of Marriott that this ‘journey’ is based on the question “what would Bill do?”.

Bill Marriott Jr.’s blog
Working out ‘what would Bill do’ is not all that mysterious thanks to the blog kept by 79-year-old CEO and chairman Bill Marriott Jnr. Here is an excerpt, in which he reviews the company’s approach to recent events in the Middle East…

“Winston Churchill, one of my heroes, once said, “If you’re going through hell, keep on going.” It certainly describes the challenge our Marriott associates have faced over the past several weeks, as Egypt, Bahrain, Libya and other countries in the region have experienced a great deal of political turmoil and unrest.

Marriott has quite a large presence in that part of the world with 30 hotels (including Pakistan) across many brands. The safety and well being of our guests and associates is always our number one concern.

In Libya, our brand new JW Marriott hotel in Tripoli opened for business just as the disturbances began. As we reviewed the options, we realized we needed to evacuate the few guests who were in the hotel, as well as our 185 associates who had come to Tripoli in pursuit of new careers with Marriott.

The evacuation was coordinated by our regional crisis team and operations team, headed up by Mark Satterfield. It was a complicated operation with special bus convoys and a charter Airbus 310 airplane.

We all breathed a sigh of relief as they took off from Tripoli airport and landed safely in Jordan, to return to their home countries and their families.

As I mentioned in my previous blog entry, Ed Fuller, our president and managing director of international lodging recently returned from Egypt where he and his team including Mark Satterfield, Alan Orlob, Kevin Montano, Brenda Durham and Simon Howe met with our associates and hotel owners to ensure that they were safe and well taken care of, as well as help them with the challenges they faced.

He also witnessed many courageous acts by our team in Cairo including a group of culinarians at the Cairo Marriott who protected their hotel by fending off protestors with their kitchen knives. The team at the JW Marriott Cairo opened up their meeting space to serve as a staging ground for evacuees to Saudi Arabia.

The Marriott Spirit to Serve has really been put to the test by these recent events, but, as always, our culture sustains us through challenging times.

Ed Fuller and Mark Satterfield are on their way to Bahrain this week from Saudi Arabia with the same mission: to recognize and thank our brave associates.

Right now, no one knows what the situation in the Middle East and North
Africa will become, but we have had a long standing presence in the region and will continue to operate as we always have, welcoming guests wherever their journey takes them and with the safety and security of our people top of mind.”