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.
Building a Brand
So, where does a company that has brought not one but two game changers to the market — in the form of W and Aloft — focus on doing better? The answer comes down to branding and innovation — two of the group’s long-held strengths.
“You’re here to deliver a branded experience and if you think of the core positioning of the brand, everything that you’re doing now is built around doing that.
I’m not sure that the industry overall does it; this notion that you would segment hotels by stars and price levels as opposed to saying Sheraton, Westin, Le Méridien, can all be five-star brands, they can all be next door to each other but they wouldn’t compete with each other directly because each one has a different look and feel and appeals to a different type of guest and traveller.
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“Think about W and Luxury Collection and St. Regis, all luxury brands but all very different from each other. That has enabled us time and again to enter a market, to add new hotels, to create returns for our owners, which is what we are in the business of doing.”
He adds that it’s vital hotel operators understand the difference “between being an asset owner and real estate developer versus being a manager of global hospitality brands”.
This is the issue behind “the one challenge the hospitality industry has when it comes to branding” — something van Paasschen calls the “asset challenge”.
“In other branded businesses you can change your collection, you can change out the interior of a retail outlet; changing a couple of hundred hotels around the world that are owned by different developers is a process that takes time.”
Now, with its nine brands defined and established, van Paasschen says there are no new brands on the radar, but he says the entrance of these existing brands to new markets will be just as disruptive to the industry as when they first launched.
“We bring Westin to India, we bring W to China, we introduce the same level of disruption and innovation to those markets as we had done previously in other markets with those brands.”
Van Paasschen senses my disappointment that there is no brand X, Y or Z to follow W, but reassures that the company is still innovating at every level — from its new SPG loyalty programme ambassador tier to expansion in emerging markets.
“In the last five years we’ve gone from 13 to 30 St. Regis hotels and we have another 10 on the way, we’ve doubled the size of W in the last five years from 20 to 43...There is as much challenge in coming up with the next new idea as making sure the current idea is fully realised to its benefit.
“With W we stand alone among hotel companies with a brand and it makes all the sense in the world for us to do our utmost to make sure we have the strongest global portfolio of W hotels before anybody else even gets started.”
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