NEW YORK — Starwood Capital Group Chairman and CEO Barry Sternlicht is adamant that the hotel business is not a hard one to succeed in, but it requires passion.
"It's not that hard of a business," he said during the 2025 NYU International Hospitality Investment Forum. "Clean [the property] up. Pay attention. Do everything a little better. Focus. And then send the people to have the rights. But a lot of people don't do that. Taking costs out is for monkeys. Driving revenue is the hard part."
Sternlicht, who was on hand to receive the Jonathan Tisch Active Citizenship Award, said that while it isn't difficult, it is a business that requires passion and personality.
"If you like people, be in this industry. If you don't, go code in a garage in Mongolia," he said. "This is a fun business, and it should be fun. If you're not having fun, you shouldn't be in the business."
During a conversation with Loews Hotels Chairman and CEO Jonathan Tisch, Sternlicht shared what first drove him into hospitality, why he's glad to be resurrecting the Starwood Hotels name for his company's portfolio of hotel brands and how he feels consumer brands should be adapting to the current environment.
From fired to founder
Sternlicht says he knew he wanted to be a businessman from a young age growing up in Connecticut.
"I didn't have a world view other than I wanted to have some money because my neighbors had pools, and we didn't have a pool," he said. "My neighbor had a tennis court, and we didn't have a tennis court. So my goal in life was to have a pool and a tennis court."
The first way that would manifest would be a drive to do various jobs, including selling knives door to door, while also picking up a sense of creativity from his mother, who was an artist in addition to working both as a teacher and a stockbroker, and a work ethic from his father, a Polish immigrant and holocaust survivor who was an entrepreneur himself.
After graduating from Brown University, Sternlicht rejected his mother's insistence that he should become a lawyer and instead went to Harvard Business School — a decision he said drove her to tears.
After graduating, he began his real estate career in the late 1980s at Chicago-based JMB Realty, where he described himself as a "wunderkind" on the acquisitions teams — a distinction that wasn't enough to save him from being laid off during the savings and loan crisis of that period.
"I was one of the top 10 guys there. I helped them grow. And the baton shifted from Neil Bluhm, who did acquisitions, to Judd Malkin, who was in charge of managing all the stuff that Neil bought, and Judd didn't want to buy anything, so he said the best way to stop us from buying anything is to get rid of Neil's acquisition guys," he said.
He described going from being a rising star to riding a bus to get in an unemployment line as a humiliating and formative experience.
"I guess it taught me that I didn't want to work for anyone else," said Sternlicht, who now has an estimated net worth of $2.8 billion, according to Forbes.
So in 1991, Sternlicht started Starwood Capital Group, leveraging relationships and contacts to raise money to first invest in apartment buildings before expanding into the hotel industry in 1994 with the $561 million purchase of Westin Hotels & Resorts. That was followed not long after at the start of 1995 with the purchase of real estate investment trust Hotel Investors Trust.
The rebirth of Starwood Hotels
The Westin acquisition was the beginning of what would become Starwood Hotels and Resorts, a family of hotel brands that would grow over two decades to include brands like Sheraton, W Hotels, Le Meridien and St. Regis. It was sold to Marriott International for $13 billion in 2016.
"I left Starwood Hotels in 2005, and I still get complaint letters from guests," Sternlicht said. "I used to send them to Arne Sorenson, and now I send them to Tony [Capuano], which I enjoy."
Almost immediately after that deal, Starwood Capital once again began building a family of hotel brands under the umbrella of SH Hotels & Resorts, including 1 Hotels, Baccarat Hotels and Treehouse Hotels, along with the SH Collection, but earlier this year as part of SH's 10th anniversary, leaders announced the company was rebranding as Starwood Hotels.
"The thing was we licensed the name. Starwood Capital existed before Starwood Hotels, and I gave it to them for a nominal fee, like $1," he said. "When Marriott stopped using the name, it reverted back to me. So we took the name back and renamed our management company."
Asked by Tisch where they're looking to expand the brand portfolio further, Sternlicht did say another brand is in the works but wouldn't give details.
What brands need to know in 2025
Sternlicht said any future brand has to take into account the shifting relationship consumers have with brands, and that doesn't just apply to hotels.
He said his decades on the board for Estée Lauder have shown him that how consumers connect with brands is different today than it was at the turn of the century.
"These new brands are much easier to launch through social media," he said. "You get Kendall Jenner or Hailey Bieber, who just sold her brand for a billion dollars."
In terms of hotels, he said this means new hotel brands should fill some need other than just trying to copy something already in the market or trying to appeal to everyone.
"I used to say at Starwood Hotels that we don't want to be the K car," he said. "We aren't all things to all people."
Like all consumer brands, hotels have to find a specific audience to drive pricing, he said.
"So the idea in every area of consumer products today is to differentiate yourself and try to figure out how to find something you can get pricing power against," he said. "The instinct is to go like everyone else, and that's exactly the wrong strategy to adopt. You've got to think outside the box."
He said purpose and connection was at the heart of when the company created 1 Hotels.
"I wanted to do something that meant something," Sternlicht said. "I didn't want to just do another hotel brand. And even though green had been done, green luxury hadn't really been done, and we were green from the start. I thought a brand with a mission would unite my people, would tell the story to the guests and would create a bit of a niche for us."
He said the thing that's ultimately the most important for the success of any hotel is the quality of the people who work in them and the level of service they deliver.
Guests "like the design, but they compliment the people, and I think that's a great opportunity. It's that focus on service," he said.