While the last major downturn significantly sunk its growth prospects, Marriott International’s luxury brand Edition has maintained growth through the COVID-19 pandemic, with seven properties slated to open in the next 18 months.

Dan Flannery, senior vice president and managing director of Edition, said the brand, which now has 11 properties open, got off to a delayed start with its debut right before the Great Recession.

The brand originated through a partnership between Marriott and New York hotelier Ian Schrager. Flannery joined the brand to build and lead the operations team in 2008.

“We had a very, very active pipeline early on,” Flannery said. “It was good times in the business, and then in 2008 and 2009, things really kind of unraveled. We lost all but three of the hotels that were in the pipeline, and two of them just because it was too late and they were almost built.”

The pipeline dried up for a while until the situation stabilized. Marriott’s executives then focused on four markets to get the momentum going to rebuild the pipeline: New York, Miami, London and Los Angeles.

Marriott opened an Edition in London in 2013, one in Miami in 2014, and one in New York in 2015, Flannery said. In the interim, the company signed a resort in Sanya, China, in the South China Sea that opened in 2016.

“Once those four got rolling, it really gave us momentum,” he said.

The brand didn’t open any properties in 2017, with Flannery's team focusing on construction efforts that resulted in five openings in 2018 across five locations: Bodrum, Turkey; Barcelona; Shanghai; Abu Dhabi; and Times Square in New York City. Eight to nine months later, the West Hollywood property opened.

The Tokyo Edition Toranomon, which opened Sept. 16, 2020, takes the portfolio to 11.

The Edition brand has 15 properties in its pipeline, seven of which should open within the next 12 to 18 months in Reykjavik, Tokyo’s Ginza district, Rome, Madrid, Dubai, the Riviera Maya at Kanai and Tampa.

There are another 10 letters of intent behind those properties, Flannery said.

The team started looking primarily at locations in cities as many of the properties Schrager has worked with in the past are in urban environments, Flannery said. Interest from markets that aren’t considered gateway cities around the world has helped Marriott build the brand pipeline, as well.

The Miami, Sanya and Bodrom properties are the brand’s most financially successful hotels, he said.

Sanya is a market that was unfamiliar with the Edition brand, Schrager or the famed New York club he cofounded, Studio 54. But the brand has thrived in the market with a demand mix heavily weighted toward Chinese travelers and wholesale business. It was the rate leader in that market about six months after it opened, and it sits at No. 2 on TripAdvisor among the market’s 1,400 hotels, Flannery said.

The Bodrom Edition property also beat budget expectations last year due to the interest in resort destinations, he said.

Marriott began the Tokyo Edition Toranomon about four years ago alongside another project, the Tokyo Edition Ginza, Flannery said. The original plan for the property in the business district of Toranomon was to have it open by April or May 2020 before the 2020 Summer Olympics.

Due to the pandemic and delayed Tokyo Olympics, Marriott decided to delay the hotel’s opening, pushing it back until Sept. 16.

Normally, Flannery said, he and his team move into a new hotel for the two to three weeks before it opens to manage all parts of the opening process. That wasn't possible this time because of the border closure.

“We actually managed that opening virtually for the first time with a 13-hour time difference,” he said.

In the eight weeks before opening, the property undergoes a styling process, setting all the lighting, furniture, landscaping and art placement. Then it's all hands on deck to complete the opening process, Flannery said.

This process was complicated in the case of the Toranomon hotel as there was an Edition team managing these phases in the U.S. during the day while a ground team in Tokyo was putting everything into place overnight at that property.

Flannery’s operations team held general sessions for the new hotel staff on the culture and history of the brand, as well as luxury service training. The U.S. team broadcast these sessions from a soundstage at the Times Square Edition nightclub at night because of the time difference.

The next 10 to 12 days consisted of running department-specific training sessions at the hotel in Tokyo, calling on trainers from nearby Ritz-Carlton and St. Regis properties.

In the final two weeks before opening, the U.S. team got up at 4 a.m. for the daily corporate wrap-up at 5 p.m. in Tokyo, and then started again at night for the hotel staff’s morning kickoff meetings.

“It was so completely upside down time-wise,” Flannery said. “We tried to direct it without being there. It’s not ideal, but I think it worked in this case.”

The Tokyo Edition Toranomon and one of its restaurants are open, but Marriott executives decided to delay opening other food and beverage venues, including its street-level bar, the Gold Bar.

“We’re not going to be able to get back into that business until there’s a pretty widespread distribution of vaccinations in different countries and people are comfortable doing it,” Flannery said.

The hotel is experiencing what most others in urban markets are, he said. Occupancy percentages have been in the mid-teens and 20s — sometimes lower.

“We’re really trying to keep a somewhat scaled-down operation until we see stronger occupancy,” he said.