During the relocation, Starwood announced that it will increase its MEA portfolio by more than 60% with nearly 50 new hotels set to open over the next five years.
When he’s not running marathons or entering triathlons, Frits Van Paasschen oversees Starwood’s portfolio of 1134 global hotels. But this CEO is not just a hotel operator; rather a developer of global hospitality brands, and as it turns out, there’s quite a difference
Often the hotel company CEOs interviewed in Hotelier Middle East have 20, 30, sometimes 40 years to look back on in the hospitality industry.
Typically, they started their careers in their teens, drawn to hotels through familial influences, then entering hospitality school while holding down a job or two, before fleeing the nest to travel the world and advance their hospitality career.
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The CEO and president of Starwood Hotels & Resorts has just five and half years in the business to reflect upon — but it this that makes him so interesting.
Frits van Paasschen was appointed CEO and president by the board in September 2007 having held global management roles at Coors Brewing Company, Nike and Disney Consumer Products, not to mention working independently through FPaasschen Consulting and Mercator Investments. It was a job he’d had his eyes on for quite some time.
“I have to tell you I’ve been interested in Starwood for longer than I’ve been in Starwood and I was drawn to this company because of its reputation for innovation and branding but also to the hospitality industry overall,” he enthuses when we meet at the group’s most recent takeover, Sheraton Mall of the Emirates in Dubai.
“When I arrived, it was almost as if many of the things in my life were a preparation towards joining the company and it brought together so many interesting facets of what I had done before but also so many things that I didn’t know as well.”
Working alongside four regional presidents with a cumulative 125 years’ in hospitality, van Paasschen immersed himself in the business, asking “what if and why don’t we” and developing a rapport with the team — something that is visible during his recent relocation of his head office from Stamford, Connecticut to Dubai for a month, following the success of a similar upheaval two years ago to China.
For any that thought the move was more PR stunt than practical, the numbers speak for themselves. Throughout the month of March, van Paasschen and members of Starwood’s senior leadership team met with 3000 associates, conducted nearly 50 owner meetings and visited all 14 Starwood hotels in Dubai.
Van Paasschen travelled to 19 cities across 12 countries and during the five-week relocation the team travelled 61,000 kilometres – the equivalent of circling the globe one and half times.
“The purpose of coming for a month like this and having visited 70 countries now with Starwood and almost 500 of our hotels is to get out there and listen and to create a culture among the leaders of the company where if someone sees something they think we can do better, then we can have that conversation,” asserts van Paasschen.
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