Marriott on the Move

As many of you may know I'm a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Some might conclude given my family's membership in the Mormon Church that our company supported the recent ballot initiative to ban same sex marriage in California. This is simply untrue. Marriott International is a public company headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland, and is not controlled by any one individual or family. Neither I, nor the company, contributed to the campaign to pass Proposition 8.

The Bible that I love teaches me about honesty, integrity and unconditional love for all people. But beyond that, I am very careful about separating my personal faith and beliefs from how we run our business.

I am personally motivated to speak now because Marriott was built on the basic principles of respect and inclusion. My father, who . . .

I'm blogging today from the Residence Inn National Harbor in Oxon Hill, Maryland. I'm here to celebrate the grand opening of this fabulous new hotel right outside of Washington, D.C. It is part of a new suburban Washington community called National Harbor. It's really a neat area with lots of restaurants and shops close by.

This hotel is a very important addition as it expands Marriott's diverse hotel ownership portfolio as it is owned by the African-American run company Integrated Capital from Los Angeles, California. Back in 2005, Marriott established the Diversity Ownership Initiative and we set a goal of . . .

It's that special time of year again here at Marriott. I'm blogging directly from our annual Awards of Excellence ceremony held at the Bethesda North Marriott Hotel and Conference Center right near our headquarters in Bethesda, Maryland.

We hold this ceremony every year to honor the best of the best within Marriott. This year, we honored nine individuals with the J. Willard Marriott Award of Excellence for consistently providing outstanding service. It's the highest honor a Marriott associate can receive. This year's recipients come from all over the world - Turkey to London and throughout the United States.

We also gave out two other awards tonight. The first was the . . .

I received two interesting comments from a reader named Brian. He asked me why Marriott doesn't sponsor people from other countries to train in our hotels in the United States.

Actually, we do sponsor international associates to train in our country. Currently, we have 590 people from different countries training at our hotels in the U.S. on what's called a J-1 visa.

These associates train for a year in our domestic hotels and they are a great asset to our company. They possess great skills and bring . . .

I was recently interviewed on Nightline and had an opportunity to talk about my role as a Mormon bishop, which happened almost 40 years ago. I was in charge of a ward-which is really a parish-of around 800 members, and about 300-400 of them were Hispanic. I had an opportunity to work closely with these wonderful people who were struggling to make it in America and trying to keep their family together, feed their children, find a . . .