STARWOOD Hotels & Resorts Worldwide president & CEO, Frits van Paasschen, says the company is building better hotels thanks to growth in Asia, but shies away from the need to create an Asian-centric brand for Asian guests which can even be exported to the West.
US-based hotel chains have been successful in exporting their brands to Asia, but the rapid rise of Asian consumers has seen hotel companies prototyping brands native to Asia or tweaking existing ones to suit the needs of Asian guests.
InterContinental Hotels Group has just unveiled Hualuxe catering to the upscale Chinese traveller, while Accor is re-engineering ts Grand Mercure in China to cater to the domestic travel market.
But van Paasschen told TTG Asia e-Daily: “I don’t think of our brands as being Western brands, but global brands.
“The key to having a global brand is to appeal to basic human needs that cut across cultures, ages, generations and incomes. So a desire to have a sense of wellness and refuge in a hotel, a desire to be extravagant, to feel like you are in a creative atmosphere – those things cut across cultures.”
“The more important thing is not having a Chinese brand, or Japanese, or French. It is having global brands that work anywhere in the world,” he said.
During a panel discussion at the WTTC Global Summit, van Paasschen said “globalisation is not Westernisation” and that a huge fear he had was disappointing Asian customers staying in Starwood hotels in the West that might not meet their expectations.
“Sure, labour costs are lower in Asia, but Asians have this natural hospitality and Asia has raised the bar for us,” he said.
Parag Khanna, director, Hybrid Reality Institute, who keynoted the session on a rapidly-changing world, said that for the first time in history, “globalisation is truly global”, with all regions of the world being equal and important.
Van Paasschen, when queried by TTG Asia e-Daily if Starwood’s last real brand innovation was the W, said: “Oh no, I wouldn’t say that at all. We launched two brands three years ago, Aloft and Element, which I think are every bit as revolutionary in their segments as W. Even for a brand like Sheraton, which is 75 years old, to re-conceive the lobby as a cyber cafe very much current to the 21st century traveller is every bit a reinvention of an older brand as creating a new one.”
Asked if there are too many hotel brands in the market, creating consumer confusion, he said: “I don’t think ours are too many. We have nine brands today. I’m a half full kind of person and I think may be Sheraton is the only one I would say truly has a global scale, so we have plenty to do with the nine we have.”
Asked to comment on the retirement of Miguel Ko, the chain’s chairman and president in Asia-Pacific, van Paasschen said: “The important thing is to look at this is a planned retirement. We’re filling all of the open positions in sequence with internal executives and doing this at a time when our business is doing well. All of those things point to a healthy corporate culture.
“I couldn’t be more sorry to see a friend and an admired colleague leave than Miguel, but I also have no doubt we would not miss a beat in terms of what work we have to do. Miguel has also agreed to stay on as non-executive chairman, which reflects his deep relationship with Starwood.”
Effective July 1, Stephen Ho, currently senior vice president of acquisitions and development for Starwood China, will become president of Asia-Pacific. Qian Jin, currently head of Starwood’s operations for China, will be promoted to president of Greater China, reflecting the country’s importance for Asia-Pacific and the company.
