Skift Take
Marriott says you really can have it all when it comes to a hotel company — both scale and quality. But can you really do that without sacrificing one for the other? Guess we'll find out over the next three years.
Marriott International is already considered, by and large, to be the world's largest hotel company, with more than 6,900 hotels worldwide spread out over 30 brands, but the 90-year old company isn't done growing.
At an investor day on Monday, the company highlighted its aspirations, which includes adding 1,700 more hotels over the next three years, and returning some $9.5 billion to $11.5 billion to shareholders.
Buying Starwood Hotels & Resorts in 2016 for $13.3 billion transformed Marriott into the world's largest hotel company, but now that the integration with Starwood is officially completed, how will the company continue to grow and, as Marriott CEO Arne Sorenson put it, "not stand still?"
The strategy, Sorenson more or less explained, is to continue following the strategy the company has held since 2015.
"We're about to test the theory we've pursued from the get-go," Sorenson said to an audience of more than a hundred investors gathered at the New York Marriott Marquis in New York City.
That theory, as Sorenson has explained previously, is to be the world's favorite travel company, and to deliver both top line and bottom line synergies through loyalty, salesforce, reservations systems and scale.
And even with the many challenges associated with integrating Starwood, from the merging of loyalty programs to the massive data breach that was announced last fall, Sorenson said that Marriott sees "the simplicity" of its original growth model from 2015 "returning."
"[The year] 2018 showed us some of the bumps we could hit," Sorenson said, "but the bumps were part of the hard work of M&A [mergers and acquisitions]," and, he added, Starwood remains a "spectacular opportunity for Marriott."
Not only that, but the company believes, "unequivocally," that its bet on Starwood, on loyalty, and on offering the scale and breadth of brands and hotels that it now has, will equate to incredible growth over the next three years and well into the next 90 years of the company's future.
How Marriott Plans to Grow
Marriott already possesses the benefits of tremendous scale, but its primary approach to growing and adding those 1,700 hotels over the next three years involves a combination of not only pursuing scale, but also quality, as well as emphasizing the importance of loyalty and of customer experience. Marriott did not reveal under which brands those new hotels will be added.
In terms of growth, executives said, it's not about purs
