Sean Hunt got into the hotel industry through the delivery door.
A qualified butcher with two Auckland shops, he became fascinated by the deliveries of meat to the city’s big hotels in the 1980s. So he made the leap into the industry, first in the kitchens.
Hunt is now the regional boss of Marriott, the biggest hotel operator in the world, and the near-$100 billion company wants to expand its footprint quickly in New Zealand. It has a luxury JW Marriott, the former Stamford Plaza in Auckland, a Four Points by Sheraton in the city and two more “high-energy” Moxy hotels coming, one in Auckland and the other in Queenstown. It wants more.
“We’re very underweight, as we call it in the hotel business,” says Hunt.
He has been in New Zealand meeting developers and scoping opportunities for Marriott, which has more than 30 brands and operates hotels rather than owning the real estate. The company is keen on opening a W hotel in this country, a brand that has been popular, most recently on Australia’s eastern seaboard.
“I think that’s the brand that we’d love to see in Auckland City, especially overlooking this magnificent harbour,” he says in a freshly remodelled room in the JW Marriott in Albert St.
Hunt says W hotels are generally new builds. “Generally speaking, we are quite prescriptive. So it’s got to be a new build, but we’ve got some discussions underway about potential conversions. They can be hard.”
An older hotel with good bones is a different story. The JW Marriott on Albert St started as The Regent in 1985 and was known for its extensive use of marble and granite that is floor-to-ceiling in the bathrooms. Marriott has partnered with the Pandey family’s CP Group, which bought the hotel last year for $170 million and is spending about $25m on a ground-up transformation of the 286-room property.
Hunt, 57, well remembers the buzz around the hotel in its early days.
“This was probably the first real five-star hotel in New Zealand. I remember coming to the Regent. I was dating a very attractive young lady at the time and I thought it would impress her. I sat there at the barstool and I remember thinking this is an impressive hotel,” he says.
Work is well underway remodelling rooms according to the JW format, building a new club, a new al fresco restaurant at street level and transforming the pool and gym area to include a luxury spa. Much of this work will be finished in the first quarter of next year.
“It’s coming back beautifully,” says Hunt. “We want to really bring this grand old dame of Auckland back to life and with the JW brand, I think this will be a market leader for the city. You’ll see this hotel really come to life in the next 12 months.”
Hunt is Marriott’s area vice-president for Australia, NZ and the Pacific where there are 51 hotels in the portfolio. The company aims to have 65 properties in the region by 2026 and 75 by 2028.
It is a fast-growing but still small part of the Marriott empire, which operates and manages 8600 hotels around the world with 135 million hotel rooms.
The Bethesda, Maryland company has more than 30 brands and the hotels are filled largely with its Bonvoy loyalty scheme members. Its 180 million members make it one of the largest loyalty programmes in the world.
Hunt says Bonvoy, Marriott’s sophisticated booking systems, yield management system with its automated learning, plus close to a century of hospitality experience, make the company attractive to hotel owners. Prakash Pandey and his C.P. Group are the biggest hotel owners in New Zealand, and pay for the bricks and mortar and the renovations.
Pandey says that since its incorporation in New Zealand in 1993, C.P. Group has experienced strong growth with a strategic property portfolio across New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, Malaysia, Fiji and the United States.
‘‘Our current portfolio in New Zealand includes over 30 hotels and the reason we decided to add a JW Marriott hotel to our portfolio is due to Marriott’s rapid expansion in this region and our long-term approach of working with luxury brands that have a proven high-performing record to drive returns for our clients and our company.’'
Hunt says: “Owners provide the capital, but Marriott spends hundreds of millions of dollars on its systems. We’re asset light.”
“I’ve only been with Marriott now for seven years [he was with Starwood before that] so I haven’t been drinking the Marriott Kool–Aid for that long. So I’ve still got perspective, but what you find is when you plug the pipe into the back of a hotel with Marriott Bonvoy, the building almost shakes all of a sudden - you’ve got a lobby full of Americans.”
The surge of US airlines putting in non-stop capacity to Auckland this summer was welcome for Marriott in New Zealand.
“That’s great news because the American dollar is pretty strong and they’ve got the propensity to pay more and spend more and stay longer because they are on a long-haul trip.”
Hunt grew up in Waitākere, and says the hotel industry opened up the world for him.
He qualified for his City and Guilds as a butcher and had two Auckland shops, one in Stoddard Rd, Mt Albert and one on Victoria St in the central city. He got the same qualifications when he moved into hotel kitchens.
“I’m 36 years with Starwood and Marriott and I actually have pretty humble beginnings. I started in the kitchens and was a chef until I moved to the front of house.”
He moved from New Zealand to Australia in 1987, worked in Queensland and Bali, then was involved in the opening of the first Marriott there in 2003. He spent five years in Vietnam, where there are now 30 Marriott group hotels.
While the US home base is Marriott’s stronghold with 5500 hotels, growth was quickest in this region. ”In terms of where’s the most exciting place to be in the hotel world, I would say Asia-Pacific in general. It’s the growth engine of the company with the fastest growing area in the world.
“Marriott is a giant in the United States, with 5500 hotels in the US alone. To give you a bit of comparison, Accor has 40. Conversely, in this part of the world, they [Accor] are quite dominant in New Zealand.”
Hunt is steeped in Marriott lore, sharply in focus with the visit of Marriott International’s chairman, David Marriott, to Australia last month. He is one of three family members who have chaired the company since its founding in 1927.
“Bill Marriott really built the company and then there’s a son David, who was down here,” says Hunt.
“He’s his father’s son, he’s very people-centric.” As soon as he arrives at a hotel, says Hunt, Marriott wants to go to the back of house to meet the chefs, the dishwashers and the housekeepers.
“If you can ever say a company this size has got family values, I think this has, and that resonates in everything we do. We’re all about people - it is a talent war and if you don’t take care of your people, the old adage is that someone else will.”
The approach is simple.
“The philosophy of the company has been take care of your associates [staff] and they in turn will be happy to come to work and they’ll take care of the guests, and the guests will be so happy and delighted they’ll come back and spend more and more money, which takes care of the owners.”
Hunt says anyone who works for the group for 25 years is entitled to staff discounts for life.
Within the group, about 100 of the luxury JW Marriott hotels are named in honour of company founder John Willard Marriott, who opened a nine-stool root beer stand in Washington DC during a hot summer back in 1927.
Hunt explains what happened next: “Then of course winter hit and no one was buying root beer. So his wife Alice went into the Mexican embassy and learned how to make hot tamales. And that was the inception of Hot Shoppes all over the United States. The company is grounded in food and beverage.”
From there, the company went into airline catering, theme parks and from 1957, lodgings.
The founders are Mormons and there is a Book of Mormon in every room within the group, says Hunt.
“We [also] have a Bible, in other jurisdictions it’s the Koran. We have this great philosophy where we embrace all and we embrace diversity.”
That’s reflected in Marriott’s and Bonvoy’s sponsorships, from F1, to Mardi Gras celebrations, to Australian tennis star and First Nations ambassador Ash Barty.
Hunt would love to see Marriott on the All Blacks jersey sometime.
“We’ve had talks with the All Blacks, we’ve never been able to put that together. Being a Kiwi, I would love to see Marriott Bonvoy on the back of the All Black jersey or on the front of it. It’s something we’ll continue to explore and look at.”
The company was also interested in sponsoring SailGP. “We’ve got a pretty impressive calendar of events in Australia and we’d like to do more here in New Zealand.”
There’s something else he’d like to see: more police in downtown Auckland.
Last week, Hunt was dining out often and got a taste of the central city after dark, following dinners with developers and owners. While the area around the Marriott and towards the waterfront was lively and safe, he said the same couldn’t be said for some other parts of the city centre.
“Speaking plainly, I think the city needs a bit of a lift. I think it needs more hotels like this and I think it needs more community policing as well to keep the city safe,” he says.
“Every city in Australia when you walk around at that time of night is community policing and they’ve got a presence. I’ve never seen one police officer in the whole city in every night that I’ve been out, which I think is something that needs to be addressed.”
Hunt also says that, like Victoria, New Zealand was too late in emerging from Covid-19 lockdowns and continued to pay the price as airlines operated their planes into places that opened up earlier.
“They are coming in but it takes a bit longer. You just can’t put these routes back on again in one week to the next.”
Grant Bradley has been working at the Herald since 1993. He is the Business Herald’s deputy editor and covers aviation and tourism.
The airline sold its last slots at Heathrow in 2020.