Nowhere to Go But Up

When Hoyt H. Harper II joined ITT Sheraton as vice president and director, marketing programs and partner marketing, Sheraton was not yet part of the Starwood Hotels & Resorts portfolio. But Harper had already spent 11 years in the travel industry, honing marketing expertise that would eventually help lead parent company Starwood, which purchased Sheraton in 1998, to inspire a number of company–and industry–changes.

In 1993, ITT Sheraton became the first upscale international hotel company to join AT&T’s International Hotel Plan as part of a three-year, $60 million partnership. “Making long-distance calls around the world while traveling on business is a standard procedure these days, and allowing our guests to save money and get special services when they make calls makes good business sense,” reported Harper, now a senior vice president and global brand leader of Sheraton Hotels & Resorts.

By 2000, Harper had helped the company reposition hotel customer loyalty programs. “An airline mile was an airline mile, so you knew how many miles it would take to get a free airline ticket, but the hotel programs had their own different rules and people found them too complicated,” Harper explains. “When we launched our “Preferred Guest,” we changed all that. Our program had a currency people understood and we eliminated all blackout dates and capacity restrictions. All of a sudden we had this big win on our hands and in its first year it was voted the best in the industry.”

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But it was a business momentum in which Sheraton lost footing. The brand was in decline, with Consumer Reports ranking it the worst in its category based on service and value. By 2009, the company had done its own research and recognized the urgency of its standing. “When we kicked off this initiative,” recalls Harper,  “our goal was to raise the esteem for the brand and put us in a position to compete with and outperform Marriott, Hilton, and Hyatt.”

With the support of Starwood CEO Frits van Paasschen and their operation team around the world, Harper led the $6 billion project to revamp Sheraton. Having overhauled more than 70% of the brand’s portfolio, Sheraton now leads the other brands and represents

30% of Starwood’s pipeline growth. Growing from 150 hotels in 30 countries to more than 400 hotels in 70 countries, Sheraton is scheduled to open 20 more properties this year, aggressively breaking ground in a number of new markets that include Saudi Arabia, Ukraine, and India. It has also developed a number of partnerships to engender customer loyalty. Here, Harper shares what he’s learned about brand development and maintaining customer satisfaction.

When starting from such a low point, how do you begin to reposition your brand?
Our brand, while recognized worldwide, had challenges with quality and consistency, and the most imp

ortant thing to be a strong brand is a consistent product and a consistent service standard. One of the first things my team did was calibrate every hotel in the world based on guest satisfaction, likelihood to return, and likelihood to recommend. We hired a third party to do quality assurance inspections at every one of the hotels and we rated them on conditions [such as] cleanliness, security, and brand standards. This data was collected and shared internally and with all of the owners, and we created a plan to decide which hotels should be renovated and the extent of those renovations. Those that just didn’t fit with the direction of the brand, we developed an exit strategy for those hotels.

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Customer insight has informed a lot of your business programs.
We spent a lot of time fixing the bricks and mortar and bringing the physical hotels to a higher standard, but we also went deep in understanding our guests and what mattered most to them when they traveled. And by doing that we were able to create new Sheraton standards. The key insight that we learned was that when you’re traveling, you want to feel like you belong where you’re staying and you want to feel like you have the ability to stay connected to those things that matter most to you. So we took this insight and created something unique in our lobby. We built a social hub called “Link@Sheraton experienced with Microsoft.” It changed how guests use our lobbies, whether you wanted to socialize online or with your colleagues and friends face-to-face, or be alone but not lonely. We found guests coming out of their rooms enjoying our public space. More than 50% of our guests use our link at some point during their stay, and when they do they’re happier and it develops more loyalty.

What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned about developing and maintaining a brand?
Some of those innovations are right in front of you. All you have to do is look. Who would have thought back in 1999 that creating a new bed would revolutionize the industry? When Starwood developed the Heavenly Bed for the Westin brand, it was the first all-white bed with a high thread count sheet ensemble. It changed how people focused on beds and it was the first bed that really made an emotional connection with our guests. The [unspoken fear] in the hospitality industry is that the bed isn’t clean. The Heavenly Bed changed all that. It changed the whole experience. All of a sudden the Westin brand took off and created a trend that virtually every brand in the world has copied.  BE