Blood, sweat, tears, and great team members.
That’s what it takes to launch a brand new hotel, Marriott International’s chief commercial officer, John Toomey, told Business Insider.
“The most difficult job for a hotelier is opening a hotel from zero, where you don’t have one guest in your hotel,” Toomey said.
Toomey joined Marriott International in 1996 and has been with the hospitality giant for nearly three decades. In his current role, he oversees over 650 hotels run by Marriott in the Asia Pacific, excluding China.
“When you’re starting something from zero, you really feel it,” Toomey said. “It takes great leadership. It takes great team members. It takes everybody coming together to make that hotel a success.”
“It’s not just the day the hotel opens. It’s the six to nine to 12 months leading up to it, from getting the hotel staffing ready to go and selling your heart out,” he continued.
It gets easier if you’ve built up a strong brand
Toomey said the job gets easier once a hotel chain has secured a foothold in a foreign market and has started to build up branding.
He added that customer loyalty programs such as Marriott Bonvoy have made it easier for hoteliers to expand their presence. As of 2024, Marriott Bonvoy had nearly 228 million members worldwide.
“Now that we have such a deep loyalty program, we are in a better position to open hotels than when I was opening hotels 25 years ago,” Toomey said.
“I opened the first four hotels we had in India. Opening those was probably a lot more challenging than the nearly 160 hotels we have there now,” he added.
In June, Kwon Ping Ho, the founder and executive chair of the luxury hotel chain Banyan Group, told Business Insider that “the worst business to be in is hospitality.”
“It is so management-intensive. It is so time and people-intensive, and it is so vulnerable to event risk,” Ho said.
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Ho said running a hotel chain effectively is all about building a working culture that prioritizes the customer in everything it does.
“You go to a hotel. You forget about the 10 good experiences you have. One screw-up, you will never forget. People are not very forgiving about screw-ups,” Ho said.
It’s not just hospitality. Business leaders across sectors have also talked about how difficult it is to launch a new venture.
Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, told Khan Academy founder Sal Khan in a 2013 interview that creating companies is not as fun as people think.
“There are periods of fun, and there are periods where it’s just awful. Particularly if you are the CEO of the company, you actually have a distillation of all the worst problems in the company,” Musk said.
“I think you have to feel quite compelled to do it, and have a fairly high pain threshold,” he added.
Jensen Huang, the founder and CEO of the chip giant Nvidia, said in an October 2023 interview on the “Acquired” podcast that “nobody in their right mind” would start a company from scratch.
“Building a company and building Nvidia turned out to have been a million times harder than I expected it to be,” Huang said.
“If we realized the pain and suffering and just how vulnerable you’re going to feel, and the challenges that you’re going to endure, the embarrassment and the shame, and the list of all the things that go wrong, I don’t think anybody would start a company,” he added.
