Barry Sternlicht Is Reviving the Starwood Hotel Brand
Twenty years ago, the hotel magnate stepped down from Starwood, which later sold to Marriott for $13 billion. Now, he wants to give it another go.
Barry Sternlicht made a fortune building Starwood Hotels and Resorts, which birthed successful brands like W Hotels, into a giant of the travel industry.
Now he wants to do it all again — under the Starwood name.
Mr. Sternlicht is resurrecting the Starwood Hotels brand starting in February, nine years after the previous company was sold to Marriott in a $13 billion deal that created the biggest hotel chain in the world. His current hotel company, SH Hotels & Resorts, will take on the Starwood name.
The move is a sign that Mr. Sternlicht, 64, wants to reassert himself as a force in hospitality 20 years after stepping down from Starwood. Since then, he has focused largely on Starwood Capital, the $115 billion private equity firm where he created Starwood Hotels.
Hotels have remained part of part of Starwood Capital’s business, with Mr. Sternlicht buying and selling them just as he has apartment buildings and other properties. But since 2015, he said, he has wanted to have another crack at making a mark on the hotel-management industry under the Starwood name.
“I’m kind of like a singer having one song,” he said in an interview. “I want to have two songs.”
Reviving the Starwood name may seem like a small change in the grand scheme of things; indeed, Marriott had retired it years ago. But beyond his attachment to the name, Mr. Sternlicht believed getting it back would raise the company’s profile and help with recruiting. He took back the brand last year.
It’s the latest step in Mr. Sternlicht’s campaign to build a new hotel empire. By the time Marriott acquired the Starwood of old, that company oversaw more than 1,300 properties in 100 countries, with brands including Westin, W, Sheraton and St. Regis. The newly reborn Starwood has three brands so far, with 14 hotels in five countries.
It will likely be benchmarked against what Mr. Sternlicht achieved the first time around.
A real estate investor by background, Mr. Sternlicht hadn’t worked in the hotel business specifically before 1994, when his Starwood Capital bought Westin from a Japanese corporation, and then began adding other chains. In 1998, Mr. Sternlicht created the W chain, whose glamorous lobbies and bars made it synonymous with sleek chic.
He pored over even tiny details — the number of pillows, how porters handled guest luggage — at existing chains like Westin and Sheraton. “I’m like the style police, so people don’t drift off,” he said.