Sheraton 2020 Repositioning Plan Focuses on Local Experiences

Sheraton Hotels & Resorts is going local with a 10-point plan dubbed Sheraton 2020 to be rolled out over the entire portfolio of 435 hotels during the next five years. As a legacy business hotel company that built its global network on the promise of consistent design and service brand standards worldwide, Sheraton has long been a preferred platform for meeting planners and busy executives who've always wanted a certain level of consistency in terms of service and design standards. Except today’s planner and business traveler want a lot less consistency than they did when the first Sheraton outside North America opened in Tel Aviv in 1961. In addition, as parent company Starwood mulls its strategic and financial alternatives, interim CEO Adam Aron basically admitted to financial analysts that its Sheraton brand is a tired brand and that the service quality is subpar in some locations. In 2008, parent company Starwood Hotels launched the Link@Sheraton lobby business hubs. At the time, the Link concept was considered really quite innovative, bringing the traditionally dreary hotel business center into the open lobby socializing scene. Since then, the company completed a $6 billion global series of renovation projects, but for the most part, Sheraton has clung to the conservative wood paneling and