Chris Nassetta pictured alongside regional and Conrad Dubai hotel staff during his recent visit to Dubai.
It’s for this reason, Nassetta believes, despite “morphing” into various aspects of real estate following his degree in finance that “he kept coming back to hotels”.
When he joined Host Hotels, now the world’s biggest hotel owner largely down to Nassetta’s leadership, he says he made a commitment to stay in the business. “I kept gravitating back and finally, I said I think I’ve figured out what I’m meant to be in life, which is I’m meant to be a hotelier”.
This passion for the business — from management and franchising to branding and operation — informs a lot of the principles Nassetta has strived to instil in his colleagues, inspired also by Hilton Worldwide’s father, Conrad Hilton. The “lofty” vision Nassetta refers to, comes from Hilton: “to fill the earth with the light and warmth of hospitality”.
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“That means delivering exceptional guest experiences,” says Nassetta, adding that this applies not just to those colleagues actually meeting guests, but to everyone back of house or in corporate office too.
“They’re not serving customers every day but without having everyone rally around that vision you can easily forget the business you’re in. We’re in the business of serving customers. I don’t really care what you do in the organisation, I don’t care if you’re the CEO, housekeeper, or anybody in between, that’s what we’re here to do, so having people focused on that and making sure that resonates, I think is as important as anything,” says Nassetta.
Following on from this, he says the team needed to know Hilton Worldwide’s “behaviour set values” and understand the “strategic priorities” — so as to answer the question of “‘we feel great, we know what we do and we know how we do it, but hey boss, where are we going? What exactly does that mean? Give me the things I gotta do’”.
He admits that at times, “I felt like if I had to talk about these things one more time it would be the end of me”. But now, though Nassetta still enforces the message —preaching to me much as if I were a colleague —he says it is easier.
“It’s more ingrained and people buy in and then they take ownership, so it starts with somebody, in this case it had to be me, not because I’m special, but there had to be somebody to start a cultural revolution, but then the people take over eventually, they love it, and those that want to be part of it take the mantle and they run with it and then it becomes very special and sort of feeds on itself.”
He’s confident that this culture will now help attract the talent international hotel giants like Hilton Worldwide so desperately need. Nassetta estimates Hilton will create 200,000 new jobs in another three to five years, something he’s excited about through various projects he is currently working on with the WTTC, World Economic Forum and the International Youth Foundation to target and reduce youth unemployment.
“The majority of jobs we’re going to create are going to be in the youth age cohort, entry level in the travel and tourism business. Today there’s 75 million youth unemployed around the world … when you look at the whole supply chain, there are 75 million jobs in travel and tourism that are going to be created over the next 10 years. So there’s a real opportunity and a need..., so personally, and as an organisation, we spend a huge amount of time matching that up,” he says.
The main challenge is raising awareness generally of the opportunities for careers — and career progression — in travel and tourism, which is why Nassetta launched ‘Open Doors’ at the start of the year, a programme which pledges to help one million young people “reach their full potential” by 2019. Through this, Hilton Worldwide seeks to “connect” people with the industry, “prepare” them for work, and ultimately “employ” them. He says that while awareness of the size of the industry — the world’s single largest employer comprising one in 11 jobs —is getting better, connection to it is not improving.
“[We need to make sure] that people know that these are good jobs; in many cases if you work hard and you get in the right company and the right culture, with training and development opportunities, there’s a lot of upward mobility. I do not think in the world today, not just here, everywhere, I do not think there’s an appreciation for that,” Nassetta laments.
While talent is high on the agenda in 2014, Nassetta says that the rest of the company strategy is the same for the new public company. He admits his own allocation of time is slightly different, informed perhaps by many years of experience heading a public company previously, but that “inside the company, in terms of the four walls, of what the strategy is and what we’re doing, it remains the same”.
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