LOS ANGELES—Now in her second year as VP of brand management of Marriott International’s JW Marriott brand, Mitzi Gaskins updated HOTEL BUSINESS® on the luxury brand’s strategy for growth last month during Marriott’s 2012 Global General Managers Conference, held here at the JW Marriott Los Angeles LA Live.
With 54 JWs open now, the plan is to add more than 20 hotels by 2015, doable considering there are roughly 30 projects currently in the pipeline. Although there are prominent JWs in Chicago, Washington, DC, and Miami, as well as Los Angeles and other U.S. cities, the brand has always had a global profile.
“Roughly 60% of our portfolio is located outside the U.S. Within Marriott International, in fact, we’re an anomaly. We’re the only brand that has more inventory outside the U.S. than inside,” Gaskins explained.
At the top of her development wish list are international gateway cities on the order of New York, Tokyo, Paris, Madrid and Singapore, where the brand doesn’t yet have a presence. And in a robust market like London, where JW already has the Grosvenor House, Gaskins can envision additional inventory in other areas of the city.
All but one of the 30 projects in the pipeline are new-builds. “Going forward, however, it’s not going to be easy to do a new-build in many of the markets where we want to be, especially locations like New York, Paris and other European cities,” Gaskins pointed out. “It’s just not an option there. So we’ll be looking much more at conversions.”
Adaptive reuses are another possibility. The JW Marriott Chicago, a 1914-era former bank building, is an example. “In our mind, though, we actually consider an adaptive reuse a new-build because while you’re restoring the building’s original beautiful architecture, everything else is brand new,” she noted. Europe presents a special challenge. “With only four hotels there, Europe is an under-tapped market for us. Because of contractual reasons, our other luxury brand, Ritz-Carlton, can’t grow there as widely as the company would like, so JW really becomes our luxury play there,” explained Gaskins, who has been with Marriott International for eight years, the first four of which were with Ritz-Carlton.
The first JW Marriott Hotel was in Hong Kong and the brand’s roots are still prominent in Asia. “There are so many emerging markets there. Take India, for example. We have two hotels there now, but by 2015, we expect to have eight,” she said.
The brand’s visibility in the Middle East is expected to get a major boost in October, when the first tower of the 1,608-room, two-tower JW Marriott Marquis Dubai opens. The second JW in Dubai, the new hotel—at 1,164 ft.—is said to be the tallest hotel in the world. Owned by the Emirates Group, the hotel will be managed by Marriott International.
Given the competitive set for luxury lodging in Dubai, you really need a special product to stand out from the crowd, according to general manager Rupprecht Queitsch. “Dubai has about 80-90 five-star hotels. We call JW’s service standards ‘approachable luxury.’ It means if the guest has to ask for something, the service delivery is inadequate. Service is meant to be automatic. All of our brand standards and training procedures are there to make this possible,” Queitsch told HOTEL BUSINESS®.
Confirmed Gaskins: “When you go into markets like the Middle East or Asia, you see product that’s over the top. It’s different than what you typically see in the U.S.”
On the one hand, the goal for Gaskins and her team is to create a consistent experience across the brand across the globe from a design and service perspective. “You want guests to know they’re in a JW, no matter where they are in the world,” she said. “But on the other hand, there are inevitably going to be differences in the portfolio because of the way guest expectations vary market-by-market, the way owners invest, differences in the labor market and so on,” she continued.
Gaskins believes luxury lodging brands can be broken down into two tiers—and JW actually belongs to the lower tier. “We’ve done research around the world and found that consumers divide luxury into two segments,” she said.
The first is what she calls “iconic luxury” in which she includes brands like Ritz-Carlton, Four Seasons, Mandarin Oriental and Peninsula. The second tier, which she calls “the new level luxury space,” includes Fairmont, Shangri-La, Grand Hyatt outside the U.S. and Conrad. She referred to St. Regis and Park Hyatt as “tweener brands” because “they go back and forth between the two categories.” JW would be squarely in the second tier.
In order to keep JW brand standards consistent system-wide, Marriott International sends in experienced managers to a new hotel prior to opening to help “seed the brand culture.”
“We’ve developed a pre-opening process that starts with the brand team going in and really doing immersion with members of the property leadership team, once they’re hired, to make sure they understand what we’re trying to achieve from a service perspective. This way, when they hire associates, they know what they’re looking for,” said Gaskins, who before joining Marriott worked on branding at Apple and Delta Airlines.
Ten days before opening, the level of preparation is raised a notch and a final countdown begins. “We bring in experts in different areas and train associates on every aspect of operations. As the days go by, the sense of pride intensifies. This brand is a lot about pride. We say we are the legacy of our founder, J.W. Marriott Sr.,” Gaskins concluded.