Each time I cover a panel at a hotel industry conference, a tiny part of me is surprised a fistfight doesn’t break out on stage. It’s an amazing thing to have executives from heavyweight rivals such as Marriott International, Hilton Worldwide Holdings and Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide sharing the stage—and industry best practices—without a suit-and-tie Royal Rumble breaking out.
You’d be hard pressed to find this spirit of cooperation in other industries. Can you imagine chief executives from PepsiCo and The Coca-Cola Company exchanging words of advice with each other as freely as, say, Arne Sorenson and Frits van Paasschen would during a general session? Having covered other industries prior to having the good fortune of landing in the hotel sector, I can promise you it wouldn’t happen.
I, and the rest of my colleagues here at Hotel News Now, got a ground floor look at the camaraderie last week when we were invited to take a tour of the Westin Cleveland Downtown that opened this spring. Cleveland, for those of you who are unaware, is in the middle of something of a hotel renaissance, thanks to the arrival of casino gambling and the construction of a brand new tradeshow facility. Other new entrants to the market include the Aloft Cleveland Downtown, and the construction of a $260-million, 600-room Hilton-branded convention hotel. There’s also been investor interest in some of the existing hotel stock in the city.
This is an unfamiliar position for Cleveland’s hospitality industry to be in, having never been in the position to recruit major conferences. As you might imagine, these first initial recruiting pitches have been a tad, well, rough. But, as Alan Feuerman, the Westin’s director of sales and marketing, told us, hotel property officials have put aside their egos and are working together to snag this valuable convention business.
As a result, Cleveland is starting to get its share of meeting business. For instance, Cleveland earlier this summer hosted the 50th Joint Propulsion Conference. Sound dull? I guess if you consider the discovery of an “impossible” propulsion system that could revolutionize space exploration dull, then, yeah, I suppose the event wasn’t much of a big deal.
I’m sure this spirit of cooperation exists in other major meeting markets, too. And if it doesn’t, it should. The good people of Cleveland are demonstrating that the morals of teamwork we all learned watching Afterschool Special programs can pay off after all.
Tweet of the week
Food and beverage plays a big role at a lot of hotels. And as such, I’m sure there are a lot of hotel owners who can appreciate this week’s tweet of the week. I’m sure some of these folks considered putting up an even more harshly worded sign than this one.
Hat's off to the hotel's owner pic.twitter.com/VOzw6cxheL — ??? ?????????? (@pdixit55) August 6, 2014
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