Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide plans to have "metro
market sales clusters" in place across at least 10 markets in North America by
the end of next year, the company said during its investor day presentation
this week.
The sales clusters provide a single point of contact for
buyers across all Starwood properties in a given area, instead of a sales force
at each hotel, said Starwood North America division president Denise Coll. Since
the program was implemented, Starwood properties in Atlanta, which was among the
first markets to do so, have seen volume increase by 10 percent to 20 percent from
large corporate accounts and by percentages from the mid-teens to lower 20s
from smaller accounts, she said.
"We also were able to eliminate redundancies across properties
in individual marketplaces and deploy those resources in markets that were
underserved," Coll said.
Starwood has implemented a similar structure in San Diego,
Toronto and Boston in the past few years. It plans to continue to add markets
next year, including New York, San Francisco, Chicago and Phoenix/Scottsdale,
Coll said.