Inside Marriott CEO Anthony Capuano’s Strategy to Win Customers—and Keep Them

**Anthony Capuano** (0:00)
For nearly a century, we've had some guiding principles that have guided how we run the business. We welcome all to our hotels, and we create opportunity for all. And we're never gonna deviate from those principles.

**Alan Murray** (0:12)
The WSJ Leadership Institute Presents Leaders. I'm Alan Murray. If you would ask me a decade ago, I would have predicted Marriott would get disrupted by technology platforms like Expedia or Kayak or Airbnb. And if you would ask me five years ago, I would have said Marriott is likely to shrink in the aftermath of COVID. And in both cases, I would have been dead wrong. Marriott has turned out to be a juggernaut, using the Bonvoy platform to master the travel business, to keep control of its customers, and to continue to grow at a stunning rate. How do they do it? CEO Tony Capuano breaks it down in this episode right after the break.
You became CEO in 2021
February of 2021 The most difficult circumstances imaginable. I mean, first of all, obviously, the pandemic, at one point, your hotels were basically closed.

**Anthony Capuano** (1:14)
At the time, we probably had 8,000 hotels globally. A third of them were closed down.

**Alan Murray** (1:20)
And the vacancy rates for the others had to be through the roof.

**Anthony Capuano** (1:23)
Our global revenue dropped by 92 percent. That's unheard of.

**Alan Murray** (1:28)
I mean, had you ever imagined a 92 percent drop in revenue?

**Anthony Capuano** (1:32)
No. In fact, I was going to say, if somebody had a fair critique of us, they would say we aired on the side of conservatism in terms of stewardship of the balance sheet. But in my 31 years there, not once did I ever see somebody run a pro forma that said, what does the P&L look like if revenue drops 92 percent? It was unchartered.

**Alan Murray** (1:53)
Unimaginable. Then the other tragedy was your CEO, Arne Sorensen, was suffering severe cancer and died.
Incredibly sad, a great man, great leader. So what was it like taking over in February of 2021 under those circumstances? What was your theory of the case? What did you think your job was?

**Anthony Capuano** (2:18)
Well, my friends at the Wall Street Journal didn't make it easier. They published an article the day of my appointment with a sentence that said, Capuano takes on the hardest job in American business. So if I wasn't nervous before, I wasn't responsible for that. I know you weren't.
Maybe the way I would describe it, I was appointed on a Sunday night, Bill Marriott called to tell me the board had selected me as, by the way, only the fourth CEO the company's had in 100 years. And as he often does in his sort of simple but very wise way, he really gave me clarity of purpose. And what he said was, nobody wishes more than me that I could hit the pause button, get the world to stop spinning for a bit so we could properly mourn our friend Arnie. He said, you're going to have to figure out in a very personal way how to manage through that grief. He said, but you're going to have to compartmentalize it. Because whether you like it or not, tomorrow morning 600,000 people are going to wake up, they're going to put on a Marriott name badge, and they're going to expect you to lead them through what is by a wide margin, the most significant crisis our company and the travel vertical has ever faced. And in a lot of ways, he gave me this gift because I didn't have time to be nervous about the enormity of the task I was taking on.
I did try the best that I could to compartmentalize the grief over somebody that was a dear friend, a mentor, a generational talent in terms of leadership that I'd worked with for 25 years, and to just focus on the task at hand.

**Alan Murray** (3:58)
Did you feel prepared?

**Anthony Capuano** (4:01)
No.

**Alan Murray** (4:03)
And when you...

**Anthony Capuano** (4:05)
With one exception.

**Alan Murray** (4:06)
Yes.

**Anthony Capuano** (4:06)
Which is, at that point, I'd been with the company 25 years, and I can't think of a more effective master class in leadership than watching Bill Marriott, who served in an extraordinary way as the chairman and CEO of our company for 40 years, and Arnie, who was CEO when the pandemic unfolded. And for those of you that have never seen it, I'm sure you can see it on YouTube. But there is a video message that he sent to the company in the very early days of the pandemic that I imagine will be used in business schools to teach communication for decades.