Marriott CEO on Tech Giants: ‘We Are in an Absolute War for Who Owns the Customer’
Photo Credit: Marriott International CEO Arne Sorenson (pictured here at an earlier Skift conference) spoke to Skift at the recent NYU International Hospitality Industry Investment Conference. Skift / Skift
Skift Take
Marriott CEO Arne Sorenson, along with his fellow hotel CEOs are right: It's not the "disruptors" like Airbnb that are the biggest threat, but the already established tech giants like Amazon, Google, Facebook, Tencent, Alibaba, and others that are the real competition for the hotel industry.
When asked this week about competing with technology platforms like Google, Amazon and Facebook, Marriott International CEO Arne Sorensen described the situation in battle-like terms.
"I think we are in an absolute war for who owns the customer," Sorenson said. "It's a long-term war, and 'long term' in digital space might be a few years."
Sorensen was part of a CEO panel that was one of the most talked-about sessions at this week's NYU International Hospitality Industry Investment Conference.
Sorensen said that while he and his hotel CEO peers will continue to compete on product and service, "I think less about Airbnb than I do about Google and Facebook and all these other digital empires who own all of us. What Amazon is doing with these digital assistants is reinventing search for voice search. They are all getting into have a profile for each and every one of our customers, so how do we use that to make sure we are monetizing that relationship as much as we can?"
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