Chapter 26
Five days after their mother’s funeral, Bill and his brother, Dick, flew to Florida for the grand opening of the Tampa Waterside Marriott—the company’s 2,000th hotel and a significant milestone.
Tampa had built a new convention center almost a decade earlier, but couldn’t fill it because there wasn’t a hotel big enough to house attendees for large conventions. Trammell Crow, one of America’s largest developers, won the hotel bid and went looking for a partner. When Crow and Bill had met four decades earlier, Crow had been so impressed with the twenty-six-year-old vice president that he was ready to build Marriott’s third hotel in Dallas, until the deal fell apart. Crow never forgot the astute young executive, and he enjoyed watching Bill’s rise to become one of the world’s premier hoteliers.
Now, decades later, the two men collaborated to build a twenty-seven-story, $110-million glass and steel tower on the Tampa waterfront. It opened April 27, 2000, fulfilling Bill’s promise of “2,000 by 2000.”1
It had taken nearly four decades for the Marriott corporation to reach 1,000 hotels in 1995, so Bill’s announced goal of doubling that number in just five years had seemed overly ambitious. The fastest way to get there was to buy another hotel company. Marriott tried to buy the Inter-Continental chain in 1998 but was outbid.
Without another acquisition on the horizon, the only way the company could reach 2,000 by 2000 was by building, acquiring, or converting at least 300 hotels, one at a time, which was no easy feat. Two of the most difficult projects were in Philadelphia, which, together with the company-financed San Francisco Marriott, nearly broke the company due to unfortunate timing.
It had been a happy day at headquarters in 1989 when the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority selected Marriott to build a $210-million hotel next to the city’s new convention center, which was still in the design phase. “We were developing and selling over $1 billion per year of hotels and then taking them back on management contracts. We assumed we could do the same with Philadelphia,” Bill recounted in a 1994 speech to Philadelphia businessmen. “The real estate market collapsed shortly after we had signed the deal. We were committed, but we didn’t have a buyer nor did we have any financing. We took a deep breath and went ahead.”2 The Philadelphia hotel went up with Marriott cash and corporate borrowing. When it opened in 1995, it was the largest hotel construction project in the United States, and the last major convention hotel Marriott built.
Later that year, the company opened its only other Marriott-financed project, the Philadelphia Airport Marriott, which offered a new Marriott feature, The Room That Works. “Our guests said they needed more space and flexibility, better lighting, and a plug for their computer and a computer data port. They said they were tired of putting their work on top of the bed and then crawling around on the floor to find a plug for their computer,” Bill said. The Marriott Room That Works featured a large, L-shaped workstation with a mobile desk, a console table, an upholstered ergonomic swivel chair, and an adjustable lamp. Two power outlets and a PC modem jack were mounted in the console top instead of along the floor. The Room That Works was such a success in attracting business that the company soon converted many of the guest rooms in full-service hotels to the concept, and its main features were copied by competitors.
While domestic hotels represented the majority of the 2,000 Marriotts, the company also built more foreign hotels than it had originally anticipated—in Puerto Rico, Egypt, Dubai, Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok, and Jakarta. It was a particularly exciting day when Marriott won the contract to manage the historic, five-star Plaza Hotel in Buenos Aires, Argentina, the first Marriott in South America.
Meanwhile, Marriott began adding a few important acquisitions in New York City, the most fateful of which was the Vista Hotel, nestled between the massive 110-story Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. When Hilton International opened the Vista in 1981, it was the first hotel built in lower Manhattan in more than a century. For a decade, the hotel had no competition in the financial district, until 1991, when Marriott opened the thirty-seven-story, 504-room Financial Center Marriott two blocks away on West Street.
Two years later, in February 1993, Islamic terrorists, attempting to bring down the Twin Towers, planted a bomb in the Vista International’s parking garage. The explosion killed six people, injured 1,000 others, and caused major damage to the hotel. The power of the blast was felt at the nearby Financial Center Marriott.
Managers and associates of the Marriott rushed to help their Vista competitors, assigning space for a Vista command post and a place to hold press briefings. The Financial Center Marriott also provided complimentary housing for four days to 120 Port Authority officials and continuously delivered food to approximately 700 first responders and cleanup crews. The World Trade Center subsequently ran an ad in the New York Times proclaiming: “A million thanks, Marriott, for opening your doors to us.” One of Marriott’s associates told a journalist: “It’s something you just do. You drop your competitiveness and reach out with your human side and say, ‘What can we do to help you?’”3
At that point, the Port Authority owned the Vista. After the bombing, it was renovated and reopened in 1994. Host Marriott bought it for $141.5 million in 1995 and renamed it the New York Marriott World Trade Center. Bill was thrilled with the acquisition and had no qualms about another terrorist attack. For one thing, in spite of its international reach, the Marriott empire had so far escaped harm from global terrorism. Less than a year after the Vista purchase, Marriott was touched for the first time by terrorism when a homemade pipe bomb exploded in Atlanta’s Centennial Park during the 1996 Olympics. Walking across the park at the time of the blast, thirty-six-year-old Marriott corporate food services manager Ron Smith was hit by shrapnel, losing a finger and the use of one foot. The incident alarmed Bill, but he made no connection to a possible threat at the WTC Marriott. Since that location had been bombed before, security in the hotel was extensive.
The New York Marriott World Trade Center.
No one ever imagined that a threat would come from above.
Bill drove to his Bethesda, Maryland, office early on Tuesday, September 11, 2001. It was a brilliant, blue-sky morning on the East Coast. He was feeling rested after two weeks at Lake Winnipesaukee and was booked on a noon flight for New York City, where he would attend a World Trade & Tourism Council executive committee meeting.
A few minutes before nine a.m., Phyllis Hester interrupted a meeting in his office to tell him that a plane had just struck one of the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers.
“I ran to the boardroom and turned on the big TV,” he recalled. “The first images that came up showed billowing smoke and a gaping, fiery hole in one of the towers. My mind went straight to our guests and associates. Did the hotel team know what was going on? Were they already evacuating? Had anybody been hurt? The hotel’s associates were well trained for emergencies, but this emergency was like nothing we’d ever seen before.
“We tried frantically to get through to the hotel staff by telephone from the boardroom, to no avail. As the minutes went by, more people came into the boardroom where, like millions of other viewers, we were transfixed by those surreal images. Then we saw the second plane hit the other tower. Total silence in the room. We were all devastated. We kept trying to get through to our people. We had no idea how bad things were for them, but knew it must be pretty terrible. More than a few of us in that boardroom could not hold back the tears.”
Hijacked by terrorists and flying at 494 miles per hour, the American Airlines Flight 11 passenger jet had crashed into the north tower at 8:46 a.m. with a fiery explosion, sending debris crashing down to the streets. Part of the plane’s landing gear crashed through the roof of the twenty-two-story Marriott below, landing in an office next to the pool and shaking the whole building. Front desk receptionist Amy Ting thought the grand piano on the mezzanine had dropped to the floor—“but then, out the windows, I saw pieces of building flying down onto the street like meteorites,” she recalled.4
One hotel guest, Joyce Ng, later wrote to Bill describing that moment when she heard the explosion and looked out the window: “Fiery debris was raining outside my window. I saw a blizzard of glass, paper, debris, and chunks of metal avalanching to the ground into the plaza between the two towers. . . . I was shocked and horrified as I watched from my room as people ran for their lives, got hit by debris, and were killed. People were dying below me.”
Ng ran down the stairs to the lobby and out the door, where a police officer was shouting, “Get out of this area and don’t look up!” She did look up at the burning tower: “Then I saw the bodies coming out the windows and falling to the ground. People stopped and stared and could not peel their eyes away from the scene.”
In the Marriott grand ballroom, 200 economists were having a breakfast meeting when the building shook and the chandeliers swayed. When noted economist Harvey Rosenblum had learned months before that the group was going to have breakfast in the expensive Windows on the World restaurant atop the north tower of the World Trade Center, he had protested. “I heard what the bill was going to be, and I raised a stink,” recalled Rosenblum. “We moved it to the Marriott grand ballroom.” Because of that, every one of the conferees in the Marriott ballroom lived. Everyone in the restaurant atop the north tower was killed.5
In the lobby, three Marriott associates gathered with walkie-talkies, as they had often practiced, to coordinate the evacuation—Rich Fetter, resident manager; Joe Keller, executive housekeeper; and Nancy Castillo, head of human resources for both the WTC Marriott and Financial Center Marriott. Several alarms were already sounding in the hotel, and the guest elevators automatically shut down. Unable to use the computers, Fetter found the last guest-list printout and gave it to Castillo for reference. He then dispatched associates to conduct a room-by-room check to make sure the guests were evacuating.
No one in the hotel could tell what had happened to the north tower because the gaping hole and fireball were not visible from any Marriott vantage point. But most of the guests knew enough to get out, using the stairs. However, Leigh Gilmore, a forty-two-year-old woman from Chicago with multiple sclerosis who was dependent on her motorized wheelchair, could do nothing but huddle with her mother in her fifth-floor room. Then a second plane, American Airlines Flight 75, struck the south tower at 9:03 a.m. Minutes later, two Marriott maintenance men found the Gilmores and rushed them onto a freight elevator to get them to safety.
By this time, the Marriott had also become an evacuation portal for those fleeing the Twin Towers through the door that connected the hotel to the north tower. Companies of firemen and Marriott staff directed more than 1,000 frightened people through the lobby to an exit onto Liberty Street. Debris and bodies were still dropping from above, so a policeman stood at the exit door to hold up the line sporadically when falling objects were spotted. Because of that corridor of safety, the Marriott hotel saved many lives.
A year later, the New York Times heralded this effort: “It was only a hotel, a 22-story dwarf tucked under colossal buildings, but in its final 102 minutes, the Marriott Hotel at 3 World Trade Center served as the mouth of a tunnel, a runway in and out of the burning towers for perhaps a thousand people or more [because] a cadre of unsung Marriott workers, from managers to porters, stayed behind to make sure their guests got out.”6 One of those selfless heroes was audiovisual manager Abdu Malahi, who was last seen checking rooms for guests on the hotel’s upper floors; he died in the courageous effort.
At 9:37 a.m., just a few miles from Marriott headquarters, American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon. CFO Arne Sorenson was driving to Marriott’s Bethesda headquarters from a breakfast meeting in downtown Washington, D.C., when he spotted a cloud of smoke south of the city. As soon as he reached headquarters, he went to the boardroom, which had become a command center. “We were able to ascertain pretty quickly that our five hotels near the Pentagon—including one right across the street—had suffered no damage,” Bill related. “In fact, our people threw open the hotel doors to take in evacuees from the damaged building. The lobby of our Residence Inn Arlington Pentagon City became an ad hoc triage center for Pentagon victims with injuries.”
In his nineteenth-floor room at the WTC Marriott, guest Frank Razzano thought he was safe. The Washington, D.C., lawyer assumed firemen would put out the high-level conflagration, and he thought he had plenty of time to leave the hotel. He showered, shaved, and packed his belongings and legal papers. He was about to call for a bellman to pick up his luggage when the south tower, after burning for fifty-six minutes, collapsed at 9:59 a.m., registering 2.1 on the Richter scale.
The ten-second collapse occurred inside a veil of smoke, so it appeared that the building simply imploded, falling straight down, but that was not the case. The top thirty or forty floors broke off, pivoted, and fell eastward onto a neighboring office building. Other sections were propelled northwest toward Battery Park, while a few sections landed on the WTC Marriott, cleaving it in half.7 As this curtain of concrete and debris fell past his window, Razzano hugged the wall next to the door, certain that these were the last few moments of his life. Have I led a good life? Would my parents be proud of me? he wondered.
Moments before, in the lobby, Marriott associates were talking with each other and the firemen, pleased that the evacuation seemed to be nearly complete. Joe Keller had managed to reach his wife, Rose, and reassure her that he was just fine, but she urged him to leave. She recalled: “He told me that he was evacuating the people, and I, selfishly, said, you get out. He said, ‘I’ll leave here when I can.’”
At the moment the tower fell onto the hotel, Keller was at the bellhop station talking to Rich Fetter, who was less than fifteen feet away. The immediate pressure from the impact lifted everyone into the air and carried them through the lobby. Fetter was caught by a fireman, who pulled him to a column and hugged him close. “I flew from the middle of the lobby to the corner,” said Amy Ting. “I couldn’t see. All I could hear were things crashing—it was like death had just passed you by.” When the remaining firemen’s flashlights flicked on, there was no sign of Keller or the other firemen behind a wall of debris. Reinforced beams installed in the hotel following the 1993 World Trade Center bombing had shielded a portion of the lobby from the crushing weight of the collapse. On-scene firefighter Patrick Carey said: “It was like the building was severed with scissors. If you were on one side of the line, you were okay. If you were on the other, you were lost.” Keller was on the wrong side.
But he was still alive. Fetter managed to reach him on their walkie-talkies. “I’m in an air pocket. I’m on a ledge. There’s a big hole and I can see down to the lowers levels of the hotel. Shouldn’t be able to do that. There’s two firemen in here with me and they seem to be hurt bad. I can’t get to them.” The firemen on the “safe” side of the lobby ordered the remaining trio of Marriott associates to evacuate immediately, and they began digging through the debris to rescue those on the other side.8
Meanwhile, the same reinforced I-beams had saved not only Razzano but also, in the southern stairwell, thirteen firemen led by Jeff Johnson of Engine Company 74. A single, narrow slice of the Marriott had survived. Razzano and the firemen found each other, and together they made an agonizingly slow thirty-minute descent down the stairs over and around blocking debris. They were at the second floor when the north tower collapsed at 10:28 a.m. after burning for 102 minutes. The rest of the Marriott hotel was crushed, as was everyone left inside, including Joe Keller. “There was only a few feet difference between making it or not,” Nancy Castillo soberly reflected a decade later, crying without apology at the memory of her colleague.
Miraculously, the men in the southern stairwell, which was now crushed to about the third floor, were still alive. Recalled Razzano, “I heard what I can only describe as a freight train coming at me out of the sky, and then debris started to fall down on top of us.” Fireman Johnson remembered thinking, “Please don’t let me go like this. I’m too close.” All fourteen subsequently made it out, the only people known to get out after the collapse of both towers.9
Bill set up a crisis center at headquarters that was staffed around the clock in the first days after the attack. Flaming debris from one of the towers started a raging fire in the building next to the Marriott Financial Center hotel, so firemen used the hotel for more than a day as a staging area to fight the fire. Windows were broken, and there was water damage throughout the hotel, requiring its closure.
The loss of life was, of course, far more impactful. When an accounting was later taken, it appeared that at least forty-one firefighters who had been trying to clear the WTC Marriott died when it was obliterated. Eleven of the 940 registered guests at the Marriott were unaccounted for and may have been among the numbers who died in the adjoining towers. Within hours of the collapse, Bill called the families of Joe Keller and Abdu Malahi. “I was deeply saddened by the loss of our men who, like their many colleagues that day, exhibited such bravery and dedication in the face of horrific tragedy,” he later wrote. At the time, he told Fortune magazine: “This is the most difficult thing I’ve experienced in 45 years of business.”10
Three days after the tragedy, Bill was invited to attend the “National Day of Prayer and Remembrance” at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. Clergymen from a variety of faiths—including the Imam of the Islamic Society of North America—participated. The main sermon was delivered by the Reverend Billy Graham, a longtime Marriott family friend, followed by remarks from President George W. Bush.
It was the same day Bill’s son John made it home from London, where he had been conducting meetings as Marriott executive vice president of Sales and Marketing. Most commercial aircraft in the U.S. were grounded for a couple of days. John and his colleagues were able to catch a British Airways flight to Toronto, where they were picked up by a jet Bill dispatched to them.
On September 20, Bill was in New York to speak to his shell-shocked employees: “So many of you performed unbelievable acts of bravery in getting people to safety after the collapse of the towers—literally guiding people across steel girders that were all that was left of the lobby floor. Some of you remained at the hotel searching for coworkers and guests until firefighters forced you to leave when it was too dangerous to remain. I’ll never forget all you’ve done here. You’re all heroes in my eyes.”
Many of them were moved by his remarks of deep gratitude and support. “He was incredibly compassionate,” recalled Rich Fetter. “We felt very fortunate to be part of what was truly a caring, family company.”
While there is never a “good time” for a catastrophic tragedy, this one could hardly have happened at a worse time for the travel and hospitality industry. During the Gulf War recession of 1990–91, the average REVPAR—revenue per available room—had fallen 5 percent. In the months before 9/11, an unexpected downturn had already caused a 10 percent REVPAR drop. “As soon as I saw the second plane hit, and I realized the weapon of choice for terrorists was a loaded airliner, I knew we were in trouble,” Bill later said. “The images of those airplanes striking the two towers played like an endless loop in the imaginations of millions of travelers for months and years to come. Hotel reservations plummeted anywhere from 30 percent to 80 percent almost immediately. Air travel slowed to a trickle. When the stock market reopened for trading on September 18, our share price fell 20 percent by day’s end. None of that reaction was surprising. Fear is a powerful force.”
Marriott reservations dropped 94 percent as travelers canceled their trips. Bill told his management team to prepare for hotels at only 40 percent occupancy. But he was surprised when the reality wasn’t quite that dire. And, “We found we could break even below 50 percent occupancy. We were never able to do this before. It’s amazing how a crisis focuses the mind.”
Bill wasted no time in rallying the industry to raise awareness in the government and among the public that staying home was not the answer to 9/11 or any other terrorist events. Two weeks after the terrible day, Bill led a group of travel company CEOs in a two-hour meeting with Secretary of Commerce Donald Evans. Since Congress was going to bail out the airline industry, Bill proposed that the government offer a significant tax credit for anyone traveling and staying in hotels for at least six months after the tragedy. He personally lobbied U.S. senators and testified before the Senate’s subcommittee on tourism—all to no avail. There would be no help coming from that quarter.
Thus, at a time when he had to consider across-the-board layoffs, he was in a particularly rough spot when it came to his 1,100 employees from the two New York City hotels. Nevertheless, he and his associates pulled out all the stops to assist the traumatized group.
Bill announced that all workers from the affected hotels would be covered by the company’s health insurance for a year. All of them would remain on the payroll until at least October 5. After that—because of the generosity of 1,500 Marriott associates donating more than $2 million of their vacation pay—all of them would be paid for a few months more. From his own family foundation, Bill wrote a $1- million grant to pay for survivor family expenses not covered by various federal and state emergency and relief organizations.
He knew it was critical to reopen the Financial Center Marriott as soon as possible so all those employees could get back to work, so he personally pushed the repair work along. As a result, when the hotel was reopened the following January 7, it was touted as the first hotel in lower Manhattan to reopen for business. New Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who had been in office only a few days, proudly cut the ribbon. He was again on hand three weeks later with Bill for the grand opening of the Ritz-Carlton Battery Park, a few blocks from Ground Zero.
These hotels, and another Ritz-Carlton that the company opened at Central Park in April, were bright spots in Bill’s memory of the months following 9/11. There were others. Four days before Christmas, Bill was privileged to carry the Olympic torch on its way to Salt Lake City for the 2002 Olympic Winter Games in February. That event itself, managed by Bill’s lifetime friend and Marriott board member Mitt Romney, was a symbol of hope, an American phoenix rising proudly out of the ashes of 9/11.
Five days after Christmas, a worker at Ground Zero found in the rubble the Marriott flag that had flown over the WTC Marriott. It was a bit burned, tattered, and torn. When Nancy Castillo delivered it to Bill at headquarters, he said he would donate it to the projected 9/11 museum. In the meantime, he directed that it be displayed in a glass case in the lobby at headquarters so every visitor would see it when coming through the main door. Intended to honor the heroism of all Marriott associates, the plaque beside it read:
Our Spirit to Serve
From sacrifice . . . honor
From adversity . . . resolve
From grief . . . remembrance
During his first four decades of hotel building, Bill rarely had to deal with on-the-job tragedies involving his employees. But beginning with the 9/11 tragedy, Marriott dealt with an increasing number of man-made and natural calamities:
• In August 2003, a suicide car-bomber linked to an Al Qaeda affiliated group targeted the JW Marriott Hotel in Jakarta, Indonesia. Two Marriott security guards died in their attempt to stop the terrorist. Another ten people were killed in the explosion, and about 150 were injured.11
• The day after Christmas, 2004, ten-year-old Tilly Smith was playing on the beach of the Marriott resort hotel on the island of Phuket, Thailand, when she noticed the sea disappear, revealing miles of new beach and fish flapping everywhere. Tilly was alarmed, and she shouted, “Mummy, we must get off the beach NOW!” Two weeks before, her geography teacher in Oxshott, England, had shown a film of a disappearing sea preceding large tsunami waves.
Tilly’s family believed her warning and spread it quickly to others, including hotel resident manager Theera Kanjara. He ordered everyone off the beach and out of the pool area, evacuating them to higher floors of the Marriott. He was the last to leave in the face of the massive tsunami. While between 230,000 and 280,000 people in fourteen countries lost their lives from the 9.1–9.3 magnitude earthquake and subsequent tsunamis, not one guest or Marriott employee lost his or her life, all because of Theera’s quick and decisive action.12
• When Hurricane Katrina lashed into New Orleans in August 2005, there were more than 400 guests and employees who had not yet evacuated from the downtown Marriott and Ritz-Carlton. With water four feet high around the hotels, the associates took care of guests for several days before the final evacuation could occur. There was no loss of life at the Marriott hotels, though it was months before they reopened—and when they did, Marriott gave the rooms to homeless employees and relief workers coming from across the country. Both Bill and Dick’s family foundation and Marriott International donated millions of dollars to the relief effort. Many associates and Marriott customers redeemed their rewards points to send checks to the displaced for their housing and recovery.13
• In January 2007, a suicide bomber tried to enter the Marriott in Islamabad, Pakistan. A Marriott “loss prevention officer,” Tariq Mehmood, successfully blocked the terrorist, who triggered his bomb in the entryway, killing only himself and Mehmood. Bill created a memorial wall at Marriott headquarters as a lasting tribute to employees who died while trying to help others escape harm. It began with five engraved names—the two who died at the Marriott World Trade Center, two more at the Jakarta Marriott, and Tariq Mehmood. At the time, Bill hoped he wouldn’t have to add any more names.14
• A large dump truck packed with 1,300 pounds of explosives was stopped by a barrier and Marriott guards outside the same Islamabad Marriott hotel on the Saturday evening of September 20, 2008. Realizing he could not go farther, the terrorist ignited the massive bomb, which could be heard from miles away and left a crater sixty feet wide and twenty-five feet deep. The explosion caused a natural gas leak in the hotel, which accelerated the initial fire into a conflagration. At least 54 people were killed and at least 266 were injured. Most of those who died were Marriott hotel employees.
“The entire security team on the ground at the entrance to the hotel was killed in the attack. These brave men were simply doing their jobs and gave their lives in an effort to protect the guests at their hotel, as well as their fellow associates. They will forever be remembered as heroes,” Bill recorded. “While many of us will grieve over this incident for a long time, we must also realize that it is extremely important to move on. Our hotels serve as homes to travelers from many different cultures where all of our guests can do business and peacefully co-exist. We are truly a crossroads for communication. By traveling the world, we all learn that we have more in common than we have differences.”15
• In 2009, bombs smuggled into both the Marriott and the Ritz-Carlton in Jakarta exploded, five minutes apart. Because the bombs were much smaller than the Islamabad explosive, the loss of life was much less—nine people. This was the second time the Jakarta Marriott had been targeted. Expressing condolences and pledges of aid to Jakarta associates and guests, Bill wrote:
“It is a sad truth in today’s world that, if someone is willing to sacrifice his or her own life in an attack, there are no guarantees of safety. Nonetheless, we remain committed to do our best to implement tough and effective security procedures working with our associates, outside security experts and the authorities. And we remain committed to providing a place of hospitality, for public diplomacy, business and enjoyment for our guests, and providing opportunity for our wonderful associates who work in Jakarta and around the world.”16