Starwood Names First Brand Prez

In a precedent for the company, Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide last month named a president for one of its brands, St. Regis Hotels & Resorts. The veteran executive is Atef Mankarios, who earlier in his career was credited with building Rosewood Hotels into a luxury brand. His marching orders at St. Regis are similar.

At present, there are nine St. Regis properties, including the flagship New York hotel, which Starwood acquired along with the Sheraton portfolio.

Starwood is interested in expanding the brand into a truly global entity, with critical mass of properties in all of the international gateway cities.

In the deluxe segment, St. Regis competes with such brands as Four Seasons, Ritz-Carlton and Regent, all of which also have announced aggressive growth plans in recent months. As a result, prime development sites—or potential prospects for conversion—are at a premium.

Mankarios said senior-level business travelers are not just important, but critical, to St. Regis' success, as is working closely with corporate travel buyers.

"We're interested in creating a high enough level of guest service, so that guests' minds are free to focus on the business they've come to conduct," he said. "This is more than a blanket approach to service. Rather, it's detail oriented and based on satisfying individual needs. International travelers, in particular, have a set of needs in addition to the more general needs any senior-level business traveler would have."

As part of a multi-brand company, St. Regis participates in Starwood's national accounts salesforce, where buyers can take advantage of a kind of one-stop shop.

"We're certainly interested in working with buyers any way they want to proceed," he said.

Mankarios' appointment is unusual: Starwood not only recruited a new president for St. Regis, but Mankarios also is bringing his entire executive team with him, seven executives in all.

The group, which covers the spectrum of marketing and operations, has worked together for 15 years, first at Rosewood and then at a small luxury hotel company, called Foresthills Hotels.

"We share the same vision of what the product will be," Mankarios said, "so we're able to skip the learning curve and hit the ground running."

St. Regis now will be based in Dallas, a distance from Starwood's headquarters in White Plains, N.Y. "Think of it as a remote laboratory," Mankarios said, "an incubator for ideas about luxury service."