In 2014 Marriott became the largest hotel company in Africa, nearly doubling its presence in the Middle East and Africa region to 162 hotels and 23,000 rooms, as it completed the acquisition of the 116-hotel Protea Hospitality Group (PHG) based in South Africa.
Now, president, Middle East & Africa, Marriott International Alex Kyriakidis is looking to bring the Middle East back into focus, as he pursues a target of delivering 70,000 rooms by 2020
Alex Kyriakidis, president, Middle East & Africa, Marriott International sat opposite his ex-colleagues as he signed the historic Protea deal, which catapulted the US $13 billion company to number one position in terms of room numbers in Africa in April last year.
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“It was interesting,” comments Kyriakidis, of the deal, for which the due diligence was carried out by Deloitte, the consulting company with whom Kyriakidis held the role of global managing director, tourism hospitality & leisure for nine years prior to joining Marriott International.
“This time I was on one side of the desk and my colleagues were on the other side. I’m not sure if that was good or bad because we could read each other’s minds, but it’s a different perspective.”
Kyriakidis transferred to Deloitte in 2002, taking his 4500-strong team with him from former ‘Big Five’ accounting firm Arthur Andersen, where he had held a 28-year tenure. The company collapsed after voluntarily surrendering its licenses to practice as a Certified Public Accountants in the United States.
It was with Arthur Andersen that Kyriakidis “cut [his] teeth on the hotel industry” auditing his first property, Cairo Marriott in 1979 in its pre-opening phase.
“It was a challenging milestone, seeing a company that you’re with for 28 years disappear off the map, and all the uncertainty with people’s careers,” Kyriakidis comments, reflecting on the collapse of the firm. “I wouldn’t wish on my enemies to have gone through what we all went through.”
Kyriakidis’ first foray into the operational side of hotels was when he joined Marriott International around the age of 60. The firm had been one of Deloitte’s largest clients, and with the transition, Kyriakidis found “a win-win”, taking his knowledge of the hotel industry and carrying on the strong relationships he had built up over 38 years in the consultancy and auditing world.
“Interestingly my relationships with my former colleagues at Deloitte continue as strong as ever,” he says.
The Protea acquisition, which took place just two years after Kyriakidis joined Marriott in 2012, was a hugely important deal for bolstering the US operator’s African presence in terms of scale and distribution. Marriott acquired 116 hotels through the deal in 2014, a year Kyriakidis describes as “momentous for Marriott”.
Now there are 24,200 Marriott rooms in operation in the Middle East & Africa region, 14,200 of which are in Middle East and North Africa, and the remaining 10,000 of which are the Protea rooms based in Africa.
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