Marriott on the Move

Well, I'm heading back to Texas, to San Antonio. That's where our General Managers for our Courtyard, SpringHill Suites and Fairfield Inn brands are meeting. There's a lot going on with each of these brands. Courtyard is rapidly expanding everywhere with a new prototype in Europe. We'll soon double the number there to about 100 hotels in the next 5 years. Fairfield Inn has been reinvigorated and the results have been terrific with higher guest satisfaction and better financial performance. A lot of you, I know, have stayed at Courtyard with its 700 hotels and Fairfield with their 500, but today I want to talk to you about SpringHill Suites and its guests.

I'm often asked, "How can you have so many different brands? Isn't that a lot to manage, and doesn't it inspire a lot of confusion?" Well, not really, because every brand caters to a different kind of traveler. Now, the

I've been talking and writing about opportunity a lot lately. It seemed to have a connection with some of you who wrote back. About two decades ago, I ignored our lawyers' advice and supported the Americans with Disabilities Act. They told me it would cost a lot of money...

It's a girl! This is Bill Marriott. This morning at 10:40 my wonderful daughter-in-law Carrie and son David had a beautiful baby girl, seven pounds, one ounce. They have two boys and now they have a little girl. Her brother Jack, when informed about this wonderful event, said "She'll love me Daddy." Jack is...

We hold a lot of company conferences here at Marriott - like the recent gathering of our 800 JW Marriott, Marriott and Renaissance general managers. That's because we want to make sure our associates are informed about all the innovative initiatives we're launching...

Typically, people who attend a conference come home with suitcases full of paper. This time, we wanted to reduce the paper chase and come close to having a paperless conference. So everyone who attended received iPods. . .

I want to keep talking about the environment because it's very much on the minds of people here at Marriott and around the world. Global warming has been getting so much attention recently, especially with former Vice President Al Gore's documentary - An Inconvenient Truth - winning an Oscar. I'm a movie buff and I saw the film and thought it was very sobering.

At Marriott, we've been working hard to conserve energy and water since the early 1980s. Now we know that also reduces greenhouse gas emissions. . .

I just returned from a General Managers' conference at the San Francisco Marriott. The associates at that hotel are serving as role models for our company's efforts to conserve natural resources and recycle waste. Becoming a better environmental steward is increasingly at the core of what we do. And I think it makes good business sense too.

Our 1,500 room San Francisco hotel launched a huge recycling effort just a few years ago. Today, it recycles about a million pounds of paper and cardboard every year. I was told that if all the paper and cardboard were stacked up, it would be ten times higher than the 39 story hotel. Our associates also recycle. . .