CEO INTERVIEW: Marriott's Arne Sorenson

Marriott International prides itself on prioritising its associates, even before its customers. President and chief executive officer Arne Sorenson explains why putting people first is the legacy he is most committed to sustaining

As only the third CEO in Marriott International’s 85-year history and the first to be from outside of the Marriott family, Arne Sorenson was always going to attract a great deal of attention when he was promoted at the end of 2011.

At the time, JW Marriott Jr. executive chairman and chairman of the board, more commonly known as Bill, commented: “I can say that there is no one more deserving or capable of assuming this role at such an important point in our company’s history. Arne knows the business, lives our core values, and has earned the respect and admiration of all of our company’s major stakeholders.

“Having personally recruited Arne to Marriott in 1996, I know that his success is related not only to his extraordinary talent, but is also due to his commitment to hard work, team play, and drive for results. As his mentor and friend, I could not be more pleased, for him or for our company.”

Fast forward just over a year and Hotelier is one of many publications vying for an interview with Sorenson, who was in Dubai for the grand opening of the Emirates Airline-owned AED 2.2 billion JW Marriott Marquis Dubai.

As it turns out, the JW Marriott Marquis Dubai is in many ways a physical representation of the priorities Sorenson has identified for 2013, so a fitting meeting point for our interview, which took place the day before the hotel’s grand launch party on February 27.

Firstly, Sorenson stresses the importance of a more experiential approach to F&B, clearly displayed in some of the hotel’s 14 restaurants and bars, namely Hotelier’s favourite Izakaya, but also Tong Thai, Vault and Velocity.

Customers want to “really have their sense engaged by different cuisines and have those cuisines in spaces which excite them,” says Sorenson. “It’s a global trend and in many respects this hotel and the market of Dubai are tremendous leaders in that space,” he reveals.

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What else is key?
Global growth is also significant, not just of Marriott’s portfolio but of the way the group is adjusting to the growing traveller market — which achieved a record 100 billion trips around the globe in 2012 — and to its presence in new locations.

There are 660,000 rooms open in the Marriott International system worldwide, comprising around US $130-140bn worth of real estate and another 130,000 rooms in the pipeline and under construction, worth “probably $30 or 40bn” in terms of real estate investment.

And the company is looking for yet more opportunities — with the new JW Marriott Marquis Dubai already acting as a beacon for investors keen to see if they can work with Marriott to develop a similar property in their own city.

“How [do] we make sure we continue to seize the opportunities that are available to us around the world, and in doing that what are the implications for the way the company’s organised, where we have our leaders, which brands we use, all of those kinds of questions but they are all very much wrapped up in seizing the global growth and being able to run hotels in significant numbers all around the world,” comments Sorenson. '

“Increasingly we’re going from offering hotels for inbound international travellers to offering hotels for local travellers as well and that’s a very different kind of business to operate as it has different implications for human resources, on the languages we use through the hotel — that’s all wrapped up in global growth and that’s an exciting priority and a big priority for us.”

It’s not just the size and scale of JW Marriott Marquis Dubai that sets it at the top of its game, however; great attention has also been paid to the technology implemented and the quality of the product— two more of Sorenson’s focal points for 2013.

When it comes to technology, the big question, he says, is: “How do we make sure we are evolving with the evolution of a global growth — so that we can communicate with our guests on their own devices in the way that they like to be communicated with”.

“I don’t even carry a laptop anymore, I carry an iPhone and an iPad and I think a lot of people are in the same boat,” he continues.

“We expect to communicate with everybody with our little mobile device and we need to make sure hotels have the technology, not just so that you can log onto wi-fi and use your device but so that we can communicate with you.

You think back to the old days, like two years ago, people would pick up the phone in their room and maybe ask for a wakeup call or ask for room service or ask for another pillow. Nobody picks up the phone anymore.

You pick up your iPhone or Android or whatever it is and you want to type in some letters and be able to send a message in a way that you believe that it has been received, so we need to make sure that you can pick up an iPhone and text us and say ‘hello I’d like a burger’.

“We do it in some hotels but it is a bigger technological challenge than you might think because we need to make sure we’ve got that ability to catch that message, you need to know where to send that message, and room service is just one of the examples. How do we make sure we recognise you when we sense your device as you walk in the door?” asks Sorenson.

The company is heavily researching how to have a technological relationship with its guests, starting with its Marriott Rewards’ members.

“It’s a real significant area of priority because we know it’s the way folks are communicating. We’ve got to take it further, we’ve got to take it to places where we don’t have loyal customers, so how do we find those customers, how do we make them loyal...how do we serve them in a way that they want to be served in our hotels?”

The need to focus on product evolution and product design stems from the same outlook Sorenson has towards F&B.

“Just like food and beverage we’ve all gotten more demanding about physical spaces we’re in. We want places to reflect the environment we’re in...we want a room that feels both welcoming and interesting so there’s a lot of product launches underway,” reveals Sorenson.

Renovations and improvements on existing hotels can also be expected, particularly as the JW Marriott brand has a new big brother to look up to: “Our oldest hotel in Dubai would be JW Marriott Deira, that’s 20 years’ old, and we want to make sure that that hotel is as exciting as this one is,” says Sorenson, hinting that one of Dubai’s favourites — famed for the JW Marriott Steakhouse and bumper brunch offer — will be brought up to speed soon.

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People First
Strategy aside, ask Sorenson about the team he is responsible for — some 300,000 people across the globe — and his real passion for the business shows through. Marriott’s employee-focused philosophy is the cornerstone of the JW Marriott and Bill Marriott Jr. legacy and it’s a wisdom that Sorenson is determined to maintain. “It’s a very deliberate effort,” he admits.

“We’ve said for decades ‘take care of the associate and the associate will take care of the guests and the guests will come back again and again’.

One of the things that is often asked in the business world today would be a question like ‘who comes first, your employees or your customers?’, and most companies would say ‘oh, my customers come first’. In Marriott we would say the associates come first,” asserts Sorenson.

“That doesn’t mean we don’t care about our hotel guests but what it is, is a reflection that we can’t service those hotel guests unless we take care of our associates because we can’t do anything except through them and I think partly that’s a function of the business that we’re in. We’re not simply selling a handbag or a sweater, which is simply all about the product which is sold,” he observes.

“The hotel business is very different. Yes it may also be about the hotel, location, but by and large the experience at the hotel is going to be about the people that you meet, so we really have to take care of those associates. This is something that has been built up deliberately by the company for 85 years.”

Pre-empting my next question, one Sorenson’s undoubtedly been asked repeatedly since stepping into the CEO’s role in December 2011, he says: “In a post-Bill Marriott CEO world, how do you keep that going?”

“The advantage is it’s already a very prominent part of who we are and so for me it’s simply how do you make sure that you deliberately pay attention to it, stress the importance of it and we’ve long been in a position where Bill Marriott doesn’t touch every associate, so with 300,000 people you’ve got to make sure that the team broadly is on the same journey and broadly they are.”

Ultimately, he believes staff are motivated by the idea that the management ‘cares’ — something which stems as far back as the Great Depression, during which time JW Marriott put doctors on the staff because associates couldn’t afford medical care.

“It’s almost universal that people want to be empowered in their jobs, they want their employers to be interested in their career growth, they obviously want to be paid well, but our associates respond well across the globe to the notion that we care about what’s going on and that they will have an opportunity to grow and succeed based on their talent and their effort. So we see that as some kind of culture which has translated extremely well,” Sorenson explains.

This is evidenced in the recognition Marriott has achieved in the Middle East alone, with it ranking second across all industries in the Top Places to Work 2012 list from the Great Places to Work Institute and twice being named Best Hotel Group Employer in the UAE by CatererGlobal.
Marriott’s sustainability focus, in many ways spearheaded by Sorenson, while hugely beneficial in its own right, also plays a key role in motivating the Marriott team. Sorenson co-founded Marriott’s Global Sustainability Council in 2007, and in 2008, launched Marriott’s rainforest preservation partnership with the Amazonas Sustainable Foundation in Brazil.

Sorenson talks passionately about various projects, including a partnership with the Akilah Institute for Women in Rwanda, through which Marriott is training 15 Rwandan ladies, already proud achievers of a hospitality management diploma, at its hotels in Dubai.

“It’s really the most exciting part of our business; you think about the Rwanda story, 15 girls from Rwanda who are here in Dubai working so they can go and open a hotel.

It doesn’t make a financial difference to us with those 15 young women, but just as you like that story, I love that story and our people like that story, and they say ‘oh I feel better about working for that hotel’. [These projects] not only make a difference but the teams love them,” says Sorenson.

Here, Bill Marriott Jr’s 2011 words resonate, with Sorenson clearly living Marriott’s core values and committing to stakeholders in the way that so impressed the founder’s son.

Marriott in MEA
First hotel to open in the Middle East and Africa region: Riyadh Marriott Hotel in Saudi Arabia in 1980.
Hotels operating: 42 properties in 12 countries comprising 12,237 rooms.
Pipeline hotels: 49 properties adding another 12,000 rooms.
Associates: 13,000 with a further 12,000 to be recuited as the pipeline continues to grow.
2012 RevPar growth: 8.3% globally.
Upcoming 2013 openings include: Dubai Marriott Zabeel; Courtyard by Marriott Jazan, Saudi Arabia; Renaissance Cairo Mirage City.