PHOENIX, Arizona—Though the overall hotel industry has seen slowed activity, the development team at Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide has maintained its aggressive global outlook by practicing flexibility and patience with developers.
“Being the most developer-friendly and the most accessible development team of all the brands is a goal that all our colleagues around the world share,” said Simon M. Turner, president of global development, during a break at The Lodging Conference 2008.
“Our development colleagues around the world, we have the mindset that we’re in partnerships with our owners and developers. … If we need to be a little more flexible and a little more reactive to our owners and developers building their hotels, then that’s what we’re here to do.”
Paul J. Sacco, senior VP of development for select service hotels, agreed.
“Working with owners who have a proven track record to get projects done successfully—it’s those owners who have legacy lending relationships and have patience and have proven to go through the cycles in the past,” he said. “Maybe it takes a little bit longer to get there, but we’re still executing new agreements with really good developers on really good sites. We’re doing everything we can to be flexible and help people get toward open.”
So far, this developer-friendly strategy has worked. Starwood has more than 500 hotels (120,000 rooms) in its global pipeline, and expects to increase its portfolio 50 percent during the next five years.
The luxury W lifestyle brand will more than double its portfolio to 60 properties by 2011, according to Turner.
The upscale Aloft and the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design-mandated Element brands have a combined 11 properties open, with a combined pipeline of more than 100.
Even with so much activity, Starwood’s development team works with each developer to tweak a new project’s core design to accommodate the styles and tastes of a given region.
“European colleagues are spending a lot of time with Paul and the Aloft team and saying, ‘European consumer tastes are a little bit different, so how do we tweak this a little a bit to have it blend to the European landscape?’” Turner said.
That same approach is used in the Middle East, Latin America and beyond.
“We just need to make sure that the product is right for that market, and we have to tweak it just a little bit around the edges,” he said.
In the case of the new Element brand, Starwood’s development team assembled a group of U.S. developers to not only tweak the basic initial design—but to shape it.
“Before we even came up with the first design drawings, we brought in and partnered up with 25 or so of the top developers in the nation to come in and help us develop the products,” Sacco said. “It was really a creative way to evolve the products and engage the developers and make them really feel like they were part of the brand and part of the group that created the brands…”
“It’s an approach, particularly with the newer brands when you’re really starting from scratch … It’s an owner/developer led (brand creation),” added Turner.
Whether or not that flexible approach will sustain the Element and other Starwood brand pipelines through the current financial downturn has yet been seen. Turner, however, was confident.
“It’s just important to recognize that it’s a partnership-driven brand, and together we’ve got to work through this,” said Turner. “We’ll ride this through, and we’ll come out the other side of this nastiness a stronger company.”