Skift Take
Starwood Hotels is channeling the spirit of start up culture in an effort to stay nimble and adapt quickly to emerging trends in a rapidly changing global marketplace.
Starwood Hotels CEO Frits Van Paasschen does not know what the Generation Z hotel guest will want ten years from now, but he wants to make sure Starwood is the first hotel brand to provide whatever that turns out to be.
“I wish I did know, I’d go buy some start up stocks somewhere,” he told Skift during this week’s annual Starwood Rendezvous buyer/supplier conference in Boston.
A primary theme at Rendezvous revolved around Starwood being the first to bring hotel innovations to market, such as smartphone keyless room entry at Aloft Hotels. However, Van Paasschen asserts, in order to remain at the forefront of the hospitality industry, Starwood Hotels has to become more agile than ever in today’s “era of great change.”
Using his own children as an example of this change, Van Paasschen says the chasm in technology development and usage between his Millennial-age child and two Gen Z kids is “pretty remarkable” in the six years that separates their ages. He added that the change is simply staggering since the Clinton era, explaining that the White House and Kremlin had less computing power at the time than we have today in our iPhones.
“Part of what that tells me is that it's going to be really hard to know what people ar
