Chapter 27
As the twentieth century wound down, Bill became increasingly
uneasy about the potential for his huge business empire to lose its edge. “I started my career in this business as a fry cook. I fell in love with this business because it moved so fast. When you’ve got six waitresses all hollering for their orders, you’ve got to move the food out,” he told one audience of Marriott employees. “Today we’re a big company and we are not very fast. We ponder too much, we overanalyze, we are simply too slow.”
He told the gathering a story from his service on the Georgetown University board of trustees. At one board meeting he had spent time talking to a student who described the bureaucracy the student activities committee had slogged through to get permission to buy a live bulldog, the school mascot. “As I joined my fellow board members, we laughed about the eight months it took the bureaucracy to okay a dog. That reminds me a lot of our company. All I can say to you is to do it and do it now. Get on with it. Have a bias to action and accomplishment. Don’t be afraid to make a mistake.”1
At another meeting of Marriott managers, Bill continued the theme that was troubling him. “We are a big company. Some say our Marriott logo represents Pac Man—out there to gobble up anyone that gets in our way. This may be true, but we cannot become complacent, and above all, we cannot become arrogant. So, at Marriott we must do everything we can to remain humble and teachable. Our competitors are aggressive and innovative. They copy everything we do. They move faster and are more creative in so many ways. We must be fast and fiercely competitive in all we do. Let’s not forget where we’ve come from and how far we have to go. Success is never final.”2
The road to success for Bill had been littered with challenges and mistakes to learn from. The business partner Bill regretted most in his long career was Hong Kong tycoon Dr. Henry Cheng. Bill had been happy enough about the $1-billion purchase in 1997 of Cheng’s hotel management company, Renaissance Hotel Group (RHG), that he had invited Cheng to join the Marriott board, expanding the board to ten members to create a seat for him. “It was a big deal for him,” recalled Bill Shaw. “He thought it was a big deal. After all, Bill Marriott was probably the best-known lodging person in the world, and now Henry was on his board.” Cheng was welcomed by Marriott shareholders at the annual meeting in May, but when the applause died down, he didn’t show up or call in for the next four board meetings.
Over the next couple of years, Cheng participated in fewer than half of the board’s meetings, and the ones he did attend were by teleconference. Since Cheng was twelve hours ahead in Hong Kong, the morning board meetings in Maryland were late in the evening for him. At least once he could be heard snoring over the speakerphone in the boardroom. Bill tried to stroke Cheng’s ego and interest by making him the board’s “Asia expert,” but Cheng did not share any expertise about the region that Bill didn’t already possess. It was still a surprise when Cheng resigned three months after 9/11 with more than a year left in his term. As it turned out, Cheng was planning a major betrayal of his partners. It would be just one of several legal challenges Bill faced in the months following 9/11.
Cheng had split his empire much as Marriott had, into a real-estate arm, which owned the hotels, and RHG, which managed those hotels. For nearly $1 billion, Marriott had bought into RHG and the management rights. But in a brazen move to try to nullify the deal, four months after he resigned from the board, Cheng sued Marriott, charging Marriott with fraud and mismanagement. At the heart of the claim was the way Marriott used its own in-house procurement companies and other subcontractors. Cheng’s suit tried to portray that as price fixing, but Marriott countered that it had all been spelled out in the original merger with RHG. Cheng even threatened to have the real-estate arm of his empire take its hotel-management contracts elsewhere. As Bill saw it, Cheng’s hotels were suffering like everyone else in the downturn and Cheng was just trying to dun Marriott for its problems.
The suit was settled three years later when Marriott bought thirty-two of Cheng’s hotels from him for $1.45 billion. That same day, the company turned around and sold thirteen of the hotels for $1 billion.3 The other nineteen were sold over the next two years for a hefty profit, demonstrating that the best revenge is success.
In every legal challenge after 9/11, desperate hotel owners were trying to renegotiate Marriott management contracts because they were losing money in the lodging downturn. The biggest problem for the Marriott corporation was that the lawsuits such as Cheng’s publicly besmirched the Marriott name with wild allegations. The company’s only consolation was that Marriott wasn’t the sole victim of this ploy. Sheraton, Hilton, Starwood, and Hyatt were all trying to fend off a flurry of similar lawsuits.
The most serious lawsuit against Marriott during that time had to do with the limited partnerships that had fueled the company’s accelerated growth in the 1980s. Most of the investors who bought into collections of Marriott hotels were initially lured by the tremendous tax benefits the LPs offered. They were also impressed by optimistic Marriott projections of future profit, none of which took into account the possibility of a severe recession. In spite of those informal projections, Marriott had always been conservative in its final contractual promises. The company guaranteed a certain annual percentage of profit in the contract, and it made good on the guarantee to its own detriment during the 1990–91 recession.
Nevertheless, a host of disgruntled LP investors began filing lawsuits in the mid-1990s claiming fraud. Ultimately, the litigation was rolled into a single class action heard by a state court judge in San Antonio, Texas. One of the limited partners, Hall of Fame left-hander Whitey Ford, who played for the New York Yankees, became an effective spokesperson for the aggrieved limited partners.
Marriott lawyer Rick Hoffman said, “Whitey and more than a hundred other investors hadn’t done so well and wanted Marriott to ante up. They claimed they were defrauded when it was really just a real estate dip.” After a three-and-a-half-year legal battle, Marriott decided to settle the case out of court. The company bought back from the limited partners all the hotels involved, including 120 Courtyards, for more than $400 million. As it turned out, the limited partners were proven to be shortsighted. Within a few years, the economy rebounded, and Marriott sold the profitable Courtyards for a great deal more than it had paid in the settlement.
The Marriott spin-off that disappointed Bill the most was Host Marriott, the real-estate-owning company that Steve Bollenbach created in 1993 so Marriott International could concentrate on lodging management. The original intent of splitting the company in two was to form a mutually beneficial relationship, with one company owning hotels and the other managing them.
“Host Marriott should have been our growth vehicle,” Bill reflected with some regret. “They had the money. They should have gone out and acquired more Marriott hotels.” Having the same goal as Bill, Bollenbach had steered Host in the right direction during his two years as CEO. When he left to become Disney’s CFO in 1995, Terence Golden, former General Services Administrator, got the job.
To Bill’s dismay, Golden began moving Host away from its crucial ties to Marriott International. Publicly Golden said the right things about the alliance, but privately he began pulling the two companies apart. He did do one thing Bill appreciated. In 1999, Golden reorganized Host Marriott into a Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT). REITs pay out nearly all of their profits to shareholders in the form of dividends. That created a tax shelter that allowed Host to buy more hotels, none of which were Marriotts.
When Golden left Host in 2000, his number two, Chris Nassetta, was promoted to replace him. Again, Bill was disappointed when Nassetta widened the gulf between Host and Marriott International. Bill’s son John saw this from the front lines, since he worked at Host for several of those years. “Terry and Chris clearly made it a separate company. They were not bashful about it. They were good people, but they did not have Marriott’s interest at heart,” John recalled. (Nassetta later left to be Hilton’s CEO.)
The most serious unraveling between the two companies occurred in 2002 when, in that post–9/11 world, Host decided to hammer Marriott International with rounds of audits and demands for lower management fees. At the time, 110 of Host’s 122 hotels were managed by Marriott International; Host was the largest single owner of Marriott-managed hotels. Though Host never took the fee dispute to court, the behind-the-scenes renegotiation was so unsettling that Bill resigned from the Host board.
Bill was disappointed with the way Host Marriott turned out, so in 2004 Marriott created a new REIT called DiamondRock Hospitality. The new company, which was organized to be everything Bill had wanted Host Marriott to be, rapidly began acquiring Marriott hotels—even from Host.
In 2005, the distance between Marriott and Host Marriott became very public and official. Nassetta cut a deal with Starwood Hotels and Resorts for Host to acquire thirty-eight luxury and upper-tier hotels for $4 billion. Since that would tip the percentage of Host’s hotels to only 50 percent Marriott brands, Nassetta moved to change the name of the company from Host Marriott to Host Hotels and Resorts, which is its name today.
Other Marriott International changes in the early 2000s included selling its food-distribution and retirement-community businesses. When Bill’s team took a close look at the company’s sixty-year-old internal food distribution system in the early 1980s, they realized that “we were sitting on top of a potential new external business,” he said. “What hadn’t occurred to us before then was the potential of selling our distribution experience to others. We discovered our costs were lower than our competitors, so we had the confidence to move quickly to sign up outside clients for Marriott Distribution Services (MDS).”
With that plan in place, MDS opened a technologically advanced, 100,000-square-foot distribution center in Savage, Maryland, which quickly became one of the top two wholesale food distribution centers in the United States. A half dozen other new facilities sprouted up after that, turning MDS into a prodigious enterprise by the late 1990s, and more than half of its clients were not Marriott.
But at the turn of the century, MDS began losing money, so the company came up with a new idea: join with hotel competitors to create a new lodging procurement company whose combined purchasing clout would reduce all of the owners’ costs. In fairly short order, four hotel chains—Hyatt, Accor, ClubCorp, and IHG—joined Marriott to found Avendra in 2001.
As the foremost hotel procurement company in the U.S. from its founding, Avendra took off like gangbusters and had an unmatched trajectory compared to other Marriott spin-offs. It took only a few years of dividends for Marriott to have its $13-million investment returned and to begin making sizable profits. Then, sixteen years after its creation, Avendra was sold to Aramark in 2017 for $1.35 billion. As a 55-percent owner-partner, Marriott’s take was $650 million against its original $13-million investment.
Marriott had entered the retirement-community business in the 1980s because “it seemed like a natural extension of our lodging and dining experience,” Bill said. “The housekeeping was similar to what we do in hotels: clean rooms, clean lobbies, mow the lawn, take care of the landscaping. And we had the food service down cold.”
By 2003, Marriott Senior Living Services managed 126 properties in twenty-nine states with a resident capacity of 23,157. But SLS had become a serious drag on the bottom line because the business was fraught with problems. “You could run at 65 percent occupancy in hotels and make a profit, but you had to run 95 percent occupancy in these places to make money,” Bill reflected. “The business was getting competitive, and liability insurance took almost all the profit out.”
More important, the company was never comfortable with the medical side of the business. The majority of SLS residents needed health care—about 50 percent were assisted-living clients and 16 percent required skilled nursing care. “Caring for healthy people in a hotel setting is one thing; caring for frail or ill people in an assisted-living situation turned out to be much more difficult than we thought,” Bill said. “We didn’t have the expertise to do justice to all their special needs. If we couldn’t do it all and do it well, then I decided it was better not to do it all.”
In 2003, Marriott found a reputable buyer, Sunrise Assisted Living Inc. of McLean, Virginia, which paid $150 million for the Marriott holdings.
Throughout the previous seventy-six years of operation, Marriott had tried its hand at a panoply of businesses with varying degrees of success. These lines of business included family restaurants, airline catering, industrial food services, theme parks, cruise ships, airport concessions, toll-road restaurants, fast-food chains, home security, a travel agency, distribution services, and senior-living communities. All of them were either spun off or sold.
Thus, on April 1, 2003, for the first time in its history, Marriott was exclusively a hotel-management company.
Two years later, Bill and Donna commemorated their golden wedding anniversary. The post–9/11 recession had dissipated, and Marriott International was thriving, so Bill was in an ebullient mood to celebrate the anniversary with his family and friends in a special way—a chartered Mediterranean cruise aboard the legendary Sea Cloud, one of the last great tall ships and the largest private sailing yacht ever built.
From June 25 to July 2, 2005, the thirty-seven members of the Marriott family and a few friends sailed from Istanbul to ancient Troy, the Greek islands, and Ephesus, Turkey. Bill loved it all—the luxury ship, the water, the family, the friends. “It was a great way for him to decompress, to relax,” said daughter-in-law Carrie. “No one could really reach him from the company unless they absolutely had to—which they didn’t. So, in his jacket and long pants—I’ve never seen him in shorts—he sits there with his books and his best friends. They hang out and chat and watch the water as we sail along.”
For the anniversary couple, the most memorable evening was the original skit that the grandchildren put on to celebrate the fifty-year marriage. The chorus crooned “Sweetheart of Sigma Chi” and “Sunrise, Sunset.” The narration ended with, “So here we are sailing around on the Sea Cloud celebrating fifty years of marriage of two wonderful people who still love each other. They have both blessed the lives of countless others through their service and example in sickness and health, in good times and throughout tremendous challenges.” Out came grandchildren representing Bill and Donna as the chorus belted out: “We’re a couple of swells, we dine at the best hotels! . . . And we’ll travel along, singing our song, side by side.”4
In the immediate months following their return from the Sea Cloud voyage, Bill and John engaged in deep discussions destined to impact both the family and the company. When Bill had turned seventy, three years earlier, Wall Street and trade media pundits became more persistent in questioning who would be his successor as CEO. Bill Shaw was president, but wasn’t interested in being CEO, as he expected to retire about the same time as Bill stepped down as CEO. The public speculation settled on two front-runners—CFO Arne Sorenson and John.
Sorenson was three years older than John and had been part of every major Marriott deal since he had joined the company. He was personable, a fine manager, and a favorite of Wall Street analysts. John was smart and an excellent hotel deal-maker, but he was more a gifted entrepreneur than a natural leader.
Bill had advanced John fairly quickly through the company ranks, putting him on the Marriott board in 2002 and promoting him a year later to be executive vice president of lodging. But Bill knew that John could only be elevated to the CEO post if the board and shareholders approved him as the best choice. “With his gold-plated name, his all-American good looks and a quarter-century in the family business, [John] would seem to be a perfect fit for his father’s shoes. Not so fast, though, says his father,” the New York Times wrote. “At 71, Bill Marriott keeps a vigorous pace, visiting 200 hotels a year. He said he has no plans to step down. ‘I’m still having fun,’ he said, and he emphasized that there was no shoo-in for leading the company in the future.”
Two years later, Wall Street Journal reporter Christina Binkley zeroed in on the issue with a lengthy article headlined: “As Succession Looms, Marriott Ponders Keeping Job in Family.” The Marriott family viewed it as a “hit” piece on John because it highlighted his occasional public awkwardness and inability to win over Wall Street analysts in comparison to the more suave and savvy Arne Sorenson.
Sorenson was quoted in the article highlighting the idea that Marriott International was a publicly owned company and not a Marriott family sinecure—hence, the ultimate rationale for Bill’s choice of successor would not necessarily be a blood tie. Sorenson told the reporter, “The [ongoing] role of the Marriott family has yet to be determined.”5 Bill was upset about the quote because it implied that Sorenson was pushing the family aside.
But after the article, it was time for father and son to talk in depth about the issue. It turned out that John had already decided that not only was he the wrong choice for CEO, but he didn’t want the job. He had only left the possibility open because he thought it was what his father wanted. So, in October 2005, Bill made the announcement that John was resigning from Marriott International to serve as CEO of J.W.M. Family Enterprises, a private family partnership John had helped create in 1993. Family Enterprises had more than $600 million in assets, including ten Marriott-managed hotels.
It was obvious to everyone who knew him that, in the ensuing years, John was happier wheeling and dealing on his own for the family’s private company, though, at the same time, he served as the vice chairman of the Marriott board. One of Bill’s greatest sorrows came as his relationship with John disintegrated in the years that followed. Their personality differences became more apparent, and John pulled away from his previously close relationship with the family. At one point, John even sued his father over money issues. The suit was settled privately.
• • •
Of all the things Bill thought his job as CEO would include, becoming a blogger at age seventy-five was not on the list. He hired a new communications chief who was high on blogging as a way to connect Bill with his customers. But he has always been a technophobe. He takes handwritten notes on legal pads at business meetings. When visiting hotels across the world, he jots down his thoughts on note cards stored in his jacket pocket. He has found he can’t do business without a cell phone, but he never owned a computer. In fact, he never learned to use a keyboard or typewriter. When he was assured that he could write his blog scripts in longhand or dictate them into a voice recorder, he was sold.
Bill’s blog debuted on January 16, 2007: “A year ago, I didn’t even know what a blog was [and] now I know this is where the action is if you want to talk to your customers directly and hear back from them.” His signature closing became: “Thank you for helping me keep Marriott on the Move!”6
His first post got 151 comments; he read them all and responded to some of them. If customers wanted to gripe about a bad hotel room or poor service, they would go straight to Bill’s blog and complain to the boss. His folksy weekly blogs, which averaged about 700 words, covered a wide variety of topics. He wrote about trips he took, what he learned from his employees, legislative issues, how his stint as a Latter-day Saint bishop helped him develop compassion, the importance of good tips for waitstaff, and his favorite place to relax with his golden retriever Murphy at Lake Winnipesaukee.
Bill’s entry into the blogosphere was uniformly praised by business writers with headlines like: “An Old Dog Learns to Write a New Blog.” The Los Angeles Times wrote that Bill’s blog was consistently refreshing because “most CEO blogs read like they’ve been scrubbed of all life by publicists and lawyers.” After five years of Bill’s blogs, the Washington Post crowned him “Chairman of the Blog.”7
When Bill flew to New York City for the announcement of a new partnership between Marriott and the children’s TV channel Nickelodeon to create a chain of upscale resort hotels with water parks, he blogged about the ceremony. Standing next to SpongeBob SquarePants, Bill smiled as a bucket of Nickelodeon’s trademark green slime was dumped over his head. “That’s the highest honor you can get from Nickelodeon, so they tell me,” he wrote. Baltimore Sun columnist Jay Hancock observed after the stunt: “Bill Marriott has perfected the art of being a CEO pitchman. Equal parts clown, maitre d’hotel and corporate royalty, he affects a ruffled dignity that draws attention without making shareholders think he’s off his rocker.”8
No veteran hotelier can forget the Great Bed Wars at the opening of the twenty-first century, when, at great expense, hotel chains “went to the mattresses” to outdo their rivals. From customer surveys, hoteliers learned that guests would pay more per night for a room with a better bed. Westin Hotels responded first with a “Heavenly Bed” campaign in 2000. Radisson advertised beds that allowed personalization with an air pump. Sheraton pushed its new Sealy Posturepedic Plush Top Sleeping System. Marriott upgraded many of its beds in 2002, but the new model didn’t catch on. However, when the company launched a mattress makeover again three years later, backed by an award-winning advertising campaign, it was a booming success.
A January 2005 news conference unveiled the campaign. Executives and staff joined the “Pajama Party Rally” on the day of the announcement by showing up in sleeping attire. Bill and his sons posed for a photo in PJs and robes sitting on the end of one of the new beds, a stunt that drew widespread media coverage. To the assembled and amused journalists, Bill announced the company’s “Clean for You” bedding campaign. Marriott would spend $190 million to replace 628,000 beds with better mattresses, softer sheets, and more pillows. Every king-sized bed in eight of Marriott’s chains would be getting seven pillows instead of five, a pillow-top mattress cover, and a white duvet. No longer would guests find those scratchy, dark bedspreads that were not laundered more often than quarterly unless a housekeeper noticed distinctive spots. Not only the sheets but also the duvet cover would be washed after every checkout. Bill bragged on his blog that “this makes Marriott’s new bedding the cleanest and freshest of any major hotel chain.”9
Marriott opened its 3,000th hotel in Beijing in 2008, just a few months ahead of the Summer Olympics there. Among those 3,000 properties was an increasing variety of brands. Three new chains had been spawned—SpringHill Suites, TownePlace Suites, and the “Autograph Collection.”
Bill and his sons roll out the new Marriott bedding.
The most interesting new brand was “Edition,” a series of smaller, trendy hotels to be created by Ian Schrager, whom Arne Sorenson courted for a partnership with Marriott. Observed the Washington Post: “An almost perfect contrast with Marriott, a Mormon who does not drink, Schrager came up in the free-wheeling, New York disco days of the 1970s and 1980s, founding Studio 54 and Palladium.” While some predicted disaster from this combination of opposites, others noted that Marriott might do for Schrager what Kohl’s had done for Vera Wang and Target for Isaac Mizrahi. In fact, the partnership worked well, but the expansion of Edition was inevitably slowed down by the burst of the housing bubble, which began a recession in 2008.10
Two of the more important hotels constructed during this time were in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. During the mid-2000s, in an effort to revitalize downtown Los Angeles, the city fathers and developer AEG forged ahead with the “L.A. Live” project: a $2.5-billion sports and entertainment complex next to the Staples Center and Los Angeles Convention Center. Marriott won the bid to be in the hotel tower. Opened in 2010, the JW Marriott hotel is on floors 3 to 21; a Ritz-Carlton hotel is on floors 22 to 26; and the final floors, 27 to 54, hold Residences at the Ritz-Carlton luxury condominiums.11
In the nation’s capital, Marriott also won the contract to build a new hotel next to the Walter E. Washington Convention Center. Boasting 1,175 rooms, the $520-million Marriott Marquis is connected via underground concourse to the convention center. In its lobby is a fifty-six-foot-high sculpture, The Birth of the American Flag, by renowned Baltimore sculptor Rodney Carroll; it is the largest piece of artwork in any Marriott hotel. Bill felt more than a little nostalgic at the June 2014 opening of the hotel, which is located near the spot where a humble root beer stand had begun the Marriott empire. As the assembled dignitaries hoisted their mugs in a root beer toast, Bill announced that this was Marriott’s 4,000th hotel.12
With the quantum leaps in Marriott’s hotel acquisitions, nothing stands out as clearly as the lack of a hotel/casino. While Bill’s major competitors were making a killing in Las Vegas, he could not bring himself to get into the gambling business. He had a chance in 1972 to sign a management contract in Las Vegas, but then even his board of directors warned it wouldn’t be good for Marriott’s image. In 1976, he passed on the opportunity to buy the Del Webb Company, including its Nevada casinos. In that case, the board again warned him away.
Bill had stockholders to please, so he was wary of falling back on his church’s aversion to gambling as a reason to steer clear of a potentially lucrative line of business. Instead, he would frequently say the casino hotels were too expensive, or that Marriott had no expertise in running casinos. But in truth, in most cases, he could have found the money or hired the expertise. He just didn’t want to.
In 2005, Bill had to decide one more time. Marriott was a major player in the convention business, and Las Vegas was a major convention town. There, hoteliers considered sleeping rooms to be an add-on to casinos. Marriott had smaller hotels in the gambling mecca, but none were “full service,” because that would have meant a casino. Because of the nature of the full-service casino hotel, construction costs on the Las Vegas Strip in the early 2000s were running at $1 million a room.
Both the board and most of his top executives were pushing Bill to approve a 4,000-room hotel and casino as the last piece of their convention network. It would be built on a piece of land that Marriott already owned. During the board meetings, playing to Bill’s well-known objections, executives assured the board that the operation could be a classic “Chinese Wall”—a thinly veiled division between the casino managed by hired experts in that field and the hotel benefiting from Marriott’s considerable expertise. Bill approved millions of dollars in eighteen months of preplanning and design work, but that hit a snag when Architecture and Construction chief Brad Bryan became unrelenting in his gloomy forecasts of costs.
Bill told the company’s developers and marketers that a buyer must be found in advance for the whole project. But the best they could do was find those willing to come up with, say, $2 billion. Bryan was adamant: it was not enough. The hotel was likely to cost $1 million a room, for a total of at least $4 billion. Las Vegas has a closed, unionized construction subcontracting market, and no one could be found to do it for less, he said. Bill believed him. The last thing he wanted was another San Francisco Marriott–like albatross of debt dragging the company down in what was shaping up to be another serious recession from the spreading subprime lending crisis. In spite of objections from most of his top men and some board members, Bill explained in mid-2008 that with no comprehensive buyer on hand, he was going to “put a hold on the project.”
And then the bubble burst. Big time. Las Vegas was suddenly at the epicenter of the 2008 housing and building crash. “It was a bloodbath,” Bryan said. The $3.1-billion Fontainebleau Hotel under construction in Las Vegas, of a similar size to the one envisioned by Marriott, filed for bankruptcy in mid-2009 when it was 70 percent built. Billionaire Carl Icahn later bought it at auction for $150 million. That would have been Marriott’s fate also. Never again did Bill venture into gambling, and Marriott remained the only giant hotelier in the United States without casinos.
No matter how many hotels were added to the Marriott stable, and no matter how old he was, Bill was determined to go to most of the full-service hotel openings and continue his inspection visits of 100 to 200 hotels each year. He still carried paint remover to clean his pants if he brushed wet paint. And he eventually got over his surprise at the lengths to which some general managers would go to try to impress him. “One of them stationed a scout in the parking garage across the street with a pair of binoculars to watch my room in the predawn hours. When I turned the light on, he called the general manager and let him know that the boss was up and might be coming down soon.”
The truth is that most of the general managers know there’s almost nothing they can hide from Bill, as exemplified by a favorite story shared by Jim Quinn, general manager of the San Antonio Riverwalk Marriott: “I typically walk every inch of the property so I see everything before Mr. Marriott does when he comes,” Quinn explained. “But in my haste [in 2011], I didn’t go to the ballroom level. So when I walked into the ballroom ahead of Bill, I saw there was a piece of duct tape holding a worn spot of the carpet down.”
Quinn covered the spot with his foot before Bill could see it, or so he thought. He pointed out every feature in the room, including the chandelier, without moving from the spot. When Quinn ran out of things to say, Bill asked, “How old is this carpet, Jim?”
“It’s eight years old and it’s due for a renovation, sir, but we keep getting it postponed by the owners,” Jim responded.
“It looks pretty old—especially that spot that you’re standing on right there,” Bill said, smiling. When Jim sheepishly lifted up his foot, “my boss just starts cracking up and his boss is bowled over. They go, ‘You fooled us! We had no idea!’ It shows Mr. Marriott’s attention to detail. He does not miss a beat.”
Bill can be tough, but he can never be called a Scrooge because he consciously works to “pay it forward.” He believes that those who have substantial means have an obligation to assist the less fortunate. He takes to heart a favorite Latter-day Saint hymn that begins: “Have I done any good in the world today? Have I helped anyone in need? Have I cheered up the sad and made someone feel glad? If not, I have failed indeed.”13 Both Bill and Donna have a deep-seated belief in giving back, a core value they have passed on to their children and grandchildren.
“The Marriott family’s focus has always been, ‘How do we use this [money] to help others?’” Bill Shaw said. Bill Marriott is not a soft touch, though a rare few have taken advantage of his largesse. His secretary Phyllis Hester has handled hundreds of letters from strangers petitioning him for money. One man asked Bill to buy him a nice RV so he could travel in style around the country.
Bill firmly believes in the admonition of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount that those who follow Him should give their “alms in secret.” He acknowledges that he pays a 10 percent tithing on his income to his church, but he otherwise does not detail his many charitable donations from his personal accounts, which one calculation suggests exceed more than $200 million given to worthy causes. A few stories have been shared by grateful recipients, like the following:
When a missionary at the Washington D.C. Temple was stricken with brain cancer, temple president Ed Scholz tried without success to arrange for transportation to her home in California. She had to travel on a stretcher, but no airline would accept her, even in two first-class seats. With no other alternative available, Scholz called Bill and explained the situation. “Is it at all possible that you could make an aircraft available to take her home to California?”
Bill replied: “You know that’s going to be very expensive.”
And then, Scholz recalled, “almost in the same breath Bill said, ‘When do you need it?’ The aircraft was made available to us.”
Some philanthropy by the Marriotts is made public to encourage giving by others, particularly via challenge grants. Donna’s extensive service on the boards of the American Heart Association and the Society for the Prevention of Blindness was undertaken in part to inspire others to assist in the research needed to combat these ailments. Bill has also served on the boards of the National Symphony Orchestra, the Goodwill Foundation, the Boy Scouts of America, and other nonprofit enterprises. At the personal request of First Lady Laura Bush in 2002, Bill spearheaded the creation of her Foundation for America’s Libraries, including recruiting volunteers and raising $25 million for the foundation over a period of several years. After the devastating 2010 earthquake in Haiti, he and his company partnered with former President Bill Clinton and his foundation to help rebuild that country.
In general, there are three vehicles for Bill’s charitable contributions: (1) personal donations; (2) Marriott corporation charitable programs, including educational and community efforts; and (3) the stewardship he and his brother have over the sizable foundation set up by their parents—and to which they have both added funds over the years. As a tax-exempt nonprofit, the J. Willard and Alice S. Marriott Foundation is obligated to publicly provide details of its charitable giving.
One review revealed that the single largest recipient has been the Marriott Foundation for People with Disabilities, which Bill’s brother, Dick, started for the family in 1989. Its main program is Bridges from School to Work. “Simply put, it takes kids with disabilities and helps them find a job—but it’s not so simple to execute,” Bill explained. Over three decades, Bridges has placed more than 20,000 young adults with disabilities in productive jobs in nine major cities.
The second-largest Marriott family foundation recipient is Brigham Young University, primarily through an endowment to the Marriott School of Management. Number three is the University of Utah, the alma mater for J.W., Allie, Bill, Dick, Donna, and John. Several hospitals are among the top twenty recipients, as are a variety of colleges with important hospitality programs, including Cornell, Purdue, and the Culinary Institute of America.
Coming in at number four is the Mayo Clinic. After Mayo’s medical staff saved Debbie’s life with open-heart surgery when she was only five, Bill and Donna began giving regularly to the clinic from their own funds and directing family foundation grants to the institution. The foundation gave Mayo $20 million for research on regeneration of damaged heart tissue.
Bill also served on Mayo’s board of trustees for years, and he even accepted a daunting fund-raising task for the clinic. In 2005, Mayo asked Bill to lead a five-year campaign to raise $1.25 billion. He agreed, kick-starting it with $25 million from the family foundation. “Then I asked for a list of patients they had had with the most money,” Bill recalled. “They were appalled, but they finally gave it to me. We started calling them, and they gave generously.” When the campaign came to an end on the last day of 2009, Bill’s leadership had brought in $1.35 billion in donations—$100 million more than the goal—from more than 286,000 benefactors in the middle of the economic crisis caused by the housing downturn.14
In all, the J. Willard and Alice S. Marriott Foundation has given nearly $500 million to more than 1,100 causes.
Not only did Bill give away money, he also donated much of his time as he continued to serve as a regional leader in various capacities for his church, maintaining a heavy travel schedule. His supervisor in one of those assignments, Cree-L Kofford, wrote Bill a letter: “In many people’s minds, humility is most easily identified with ‘the poor, the lame and the halt,’ but seldom is the word used to describe a dynamic, successful leader. I think the thing that came most forcibly to my mind [during a meeting] was that you truly are a humble servant of our Heavenly Father.”15
Part of the respect for Bill among the Church’s leaders stems from the impact he has had on the Church’s worldwide missionary work. He has placed hundreds of thousands of copies of the Book of Mormon in the company’s hotel rooms alongside the Bible.
Beginning in 1977, he has hosted the annual “Festival of Lights” at the Washington D.C. Temple Visitors’ Center, to which the public and prominent political leaders are invited. Typically, dozens of diplomats attend the event at Bill’s invitation.
He often hosts other events for diplomats in Washington to mingle with officials of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, with the aim of shoring up Church relations around the world.
In an interview, Elder Russell M. Nelson (who later became President of the Church) stressed that Bill helped pave the way for the Church’s Christian missionary work in many countries because “the Marriott name carried so much weight with these people. They were doing cartwheels to get Marriott hotels in their countries, so when Bill hosted an activity, lending his good name and his great faith to the Lord’s work, they came and they listened.”
Whenever Bill opened a hotel in a foreign country where the Church had problems with missionary visas, he made sure Church leaders were on hand to meet the government’s officials who attended his grand openings. Elder D. Todd Christofferson, an Apostle, never forgot what a difference it made for the Church’s relations with the Mexican government when Bill introduced him to President Ernesto Zedillo at the opening of a Mexico City Marriott. “Bill was just so up front about the Church. He was not in the least reticent or embarrassed in any way about his membership and bringing it to the forefront.”
Finally, at the age of seventy-nine, in June 2011, Bill was released from his last prominent Church leadership position—an office called Area Seventy. By that time, he had the longest tenure of anyone in the calling—fifteen years, or three times the normal service. Elder Kofford wrote him a note on the occasion: “It’s a little like Mount Rushmore came tumbling down.”