Skift Take
Some may consider JW Marriott a bit stodgy, but the luxury brand knows what it is and who its guests are, and it is busy curating experiences to win their passions. With only 63 hotels currently, and another 35 on the way, JW Marriott must be doing something right.
Luxury brand JW Marriott Hotels & Resorts is all about attracting "Accomplished" travelers, and exercising their "passion points," which global brand manager Mitzi Gaskins describes as "culture, culinary and wellness."
To execute on these goals, JW has partnered with the likes of the Joffrey Ballet and Christies, and is in the midst of redesigning spas and curating in-hotel experiences to make things both more accessible and customized at the same time. Skift caught up with Mitzi Gaskins to discuss trends at JW Marriott, and excerpts from the interview follow:
Skift: What’s keeping you busy these days? What are some of the big brand initiatives that you are working on for 2014?
Mitzi Gaskins: Probably the biggest thing that keeps us busy right now, outside of the brand initiatives, is our growth. We have 35 hotels in our pipeline with 63 existing hotels. When you are opening that many hotels we are doing a lot of design reviews and just getting these hotels ready so they open up on brand and on strategy. We are also focusing a lot on developing our service platform. That’s something we’ve been focusing on, probably for the last three years. And we are cointinuing to build foundation. We are really looking at how we attract talent and acquire that talent, how we develop it, how we recognize them. How do we stay modern in today’s world. With everyone using smartphones and mobile devices and how do we integrate tools into that, as well.
We have a lot of brand partners who can really give our guests guidance around their passion points, which are culture, culinary and wellness. The funny thing about it is we’ve been actually been able to use these partners in different ways. Joffrey Ballet, for example, is one of our partners. We’ve been using them to do trainings on how to teach our associates to hold themselves at point and grace. They use their ballerinas and dancers to help instruct those and do training vignettes so it’s been a really fun year working w
