Company Update: Starwood's SPG Pro

Nov 11, 2014

Starwood vice president of sales for Europe, Middle East & Africa Asad Ahmed.

And of course the business benefits of the SPG Pro scheme are clear for Starwood — more repeat customers and smaller distribution costs, which means the sales team can make the most of every Starwood room, and thereby more effectively fulfil the company’s responsibilities to owners and stakeholders.

To further ensure an aligned approach to sales, training and development has been a major focus for Ahmed, and no less with the SPG loyalty scheme, which has been done across departments.

“[Training] won’t just be within the sales organisation; it will be across the organisation,” he says.

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“When a customer enters the pipeline of conversation with Starwood, they might enter through a direct property, through our sales office, or somewhere in between. As they interact with all of the sales functions, it needs to be seamless to them.

“Everybody has to understand and engage with customers on the value proposition; what’s different and how this is potentially better for them, and our sales population will have a task in the first quarter of next year to really engage the customers.

Having the sales teams under one roof in the Middle East office makes this task in our region easier, with communication happening at multiple levels and throughout the course of a year, and over the course of a transaction.

“The sharing of information, the collaboration that’s involved with interacting with customers; there’s no such thing as ‘his customer’, but everyone is Starwood’s customer and we win the business or lose the business together,” adds Ahmed.

With 46 hotels operational today in the Middle East, and another 35 expected to open by 2017, including the 660-room property next door, the region as Ahmed acknowledges is “a pretty important part of our business”.

In fact, in the last year, the number of SPG members in the Middle East has grown by 11%, with more than 260,000 members having enrolled across the region in 2013.

SPG Members grew by 50% in Qatar, 14% in Kuwait and 10% in the UAE in 2013, and according to Ahmed, 51% of occupancy in the region is currently driven by the SPG programme — 1% higher than the global figure of 50%.

In fact, some hotels in the Middle East have 75–80% occupancy driven by SPG, which according to Ahmed serves to outline the scope of demand from a huge variety of different segments in this region.

“This is a very unique market in many ways in the sense that you have every type of guest,” explains Ahmed. “So we have a strong travel agent community, a strong corporate base, meetings and events, as well as weddings. So from a loyalty perspective it is very strong.”

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