Baker To Head N.A. Sales At Millennium

Millennium Hotels and Resorts last month named hotel veteran Stephen Baker vice president of sales and marketing for North America, responsible for managing corporate accounts.

"The market is at an interesting point right now, having seen an increase in bookings and revenue over the summer," said Baker, who previously was Raffles International vice president of global sales for the Americas. "The question for both hotels and buyers is whether that improvement will continue to strengthen now that we're into the fall business travel season and then what effect that will have on 2004 rate negotiations."

Baker began his career working at the property level as a room clerk at Hilton Hotels' Waldorf-Astoria in New York and subsequently held sales positions at that property, as well as for New York-area Sheraton and Crowne Plaza hotels. Consequently, he understands the value of property-level relationships. "For as important as chainwide deals might be, buyers never want to forego those local relationships, especially in their most heavily used destinations," he said. "Even when the market seems to favor the buyer as much as we've seen in the past year or two, you want to have those relationships in place going forward when the market may look much different."

Baker said he is mindful that many companies last year consolidated the number of hotels they're using in key markets and are likely to do the same this year. "We know that it's increasingly about delivering marketshare and that the stakes have been raised for us. If there are three hotels in a city in the program, where before there were five and before that seven, we still want to be one of the three." The challenge for such a midsize hotel company as Millennium—part of London-based Millennium and Copthorne Plc, which has 91 properties—is to be sure it is included in as many buyers' requests for proposals as possible. With 14 U.S. Millennium-branded properties, brand recognition is still an issue. "With less distribution than many of our competitors," he said, "we just have to work harder—and deliver better on our promises—in order to get noticed."

Baker also acknowledged two other realities of the present marketplace that are not going away anytime soon: Internet rates and reverse online auctions. "Like every hotel company, we're struggling to come up with the right Internet strategy, from our own branded site to the numerous third-party discount sites," he said. "For us, it's still a work in progress. What's amazing is how quickly Web rates have become a force in the market. Similarly, we have a lot of reservations about reverse auctions, but at the end of the day the message is as clear as it is with any sales tool: If this is how buyers want to buy, reservations notwithstanding, this is how we have to sell."