Over the course of five decades leading the most noteworthy companies in the hotel industry, Eric Danziger has amassed enough titles and accolades for five careers.

But beyond being the man who helped build companies such as Wyndham Hotels & Resorts and Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide — and being the person at the helm of a hotel brand owned by a sitting U.S. president — Danziger sees the people around him as the true measure of his success.

"It's hard for me to say there's any one deal I take the most pride in because I take great pride and joy in the teams I've put together," he said. "They let me look better than I really am."

Speaking with Hotel News Now just after announcing his retirement from his most recent position — CEO of Braintree Group — Danziger opined on the successes and failures of a storied career, including the literal creation of an industry icon.

Danziger, who describes himself as "approaching 70," began his career as a bellman at the Fairmont San Francisco when he was 17. But it was in the 1980s as a young executive for the then DoubleTree Hotels Corporation that he first found notoriety within the hotel industry.

When the brand had 13 hotels in 1985 and executives were looking for ways to take the next step, Danziger and his team devised a way to give the DoubleTree brand a more welcoming feel. They came up with something "accidentally brilliant," he recalled.

"We were a tiny little company," he said. "It was about how do we have ... product differentiation. Every hotel company talked about service, service, service, service, all that stuff. ... We stumbled on how when you stay at a hotel, everybody says they're gonna make it feel like you're at home. We said, 'What's the next step to that?' And that was basically milk and cookies."

Danziger said the idea of ending a day with cookies and milk appealed to his team — and to travelers — because of how much it hearkened back to childhood, but it wasn't a totally practical idea.

"The milk lasted one day," he said. "It's not wise to put milk in a hotel room."

Today, the DoubleTree cookie is almost a brand unto itself, giving the now-Hilton-owned brand a uniqueness sought after across the industry.

"We didn't intend for it to be an icon," Danziger said. "It's not like we said, 'We're going to create this thing that's going to be like McDonald's fries,' but it became that. You had kids saying, 'Hey Dad, when you come back from the DoubleTree, bring some cookies home.'"

Danziger looks back at his period with Wyndham Hotel Group — now known as Wyndham Hotels & Resorts — as probably his greatest accomplishment.

Early in his tenure, Danziger said he was given pretty clear indications that the company was on its last legs.

"Trammell Crow owns the company. We had 11 hotels. It was 1990, and real estate was kind of in the tank," he said. "He was selling a few of the big hotels to Stouffer's at the time. I get recruited to go be president of Wyndham Hotels. We show up in Dallas and [Trammell's son] Harlan Crow brings me into a little office and said, 'Look, you can see it in the papers. You might want to lease a house and not buy.'"

The Crows indicated there simply wasn't money available to buy more hotels and grow Wyndham, but Danziger took that as a challenge.

"We bought a house and said, 'No, we're going to make this thing work,'" he said. "Then we grew that original Wyndham there without buying another hotel. It was all management contracts. I feel terrific about helping to resurrect a great company and make it a substantial force in the hotel business."

Today, Wyndham sits as one of the largest global hotel branding companies, with roughly 9,100 properties in 95 countries across 24 brands.

Danziger served two tenures at Wyndham, first in the 1990s which he describes as "old Wyndham," and again in the 2000s and 2010s as a more sophisticated public company, which he calls "new Wyndham."

That company has been in the news a lot recently, as it's been the target of a hostile takeover attempt from competitor Choice Hotels International. Danziger wouldn't comment on that potential deal specifically, but he said it's indicative of a shift in C-suite priorities across the industry.

Several of the companies he once led, including Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, Carlson Hotels and Hampshire Hotels Management — later renamed Dream Hotel Group — have all been acquired by larger hotel companies.

"When I was a young hotel guy, the business was run by hoteliers," he said. "If you went back and looked at all the companies, they were all run by hoteliers, and that's what the young hotel guys wanted to be. ... The industry then changed from hoteliers to more of a finance bent — and there's some wonderful guys. Arne Sorenson was a wonderful guy. Chris Nassetta is a wonderful guy. But they come from real estate or finance. The companies had an entirely different outlook on how they were going to maximize their value. It had much more to do with consolidation and growth and adding brands. I feel, legacy-wise, that the day of the real hoteliers has passed."

Danziger recounted a story from his earlier days at Wyndham when he, looking to prove the company could move up market at bit, sought to win over the management contract of a Hyatt near Los Angeles International Airport. A big part of winning that hotel — which was owned by former Phoenix Suns owner Robert Sarver — was guaranteeing a $5 million net operating income.

"I said, 'This is a location-specific hotel. Our brand is the same as another. The people staying there will still want to stay at this hotel if it's a Wyndham," he said. "We lost the $5 million year one."

Danziger had pitched the deal to his bosses in part as a "billboard" for the Wyndham brand. He said losing that money was a lesson in the true power of brand loyalty for him, but his bosses also gave him a much more specific lesson from that.

"I remember Harlan Crow saying to me: 'Hey, do me a favor. Next time, if you want $5 million, we can get about 500 billboards,'" Danziger said.

The LAX deal ended up being an integral part of Danziger's growth, in part because of the relationship he built with Sarver and because it caught the eye of Barry Sternlicht, who in the mid-1990s was looking to build his own portfolio of hotel brands.

"At the time, Barry was chairman of Westin, and Westin was the other competitor bidding for that hotel and didn't get it," Danziger said. Sternlicht "asked Sarver why he didn't get it and Wyndham did, and he said, 'Because they have something you don't have.' And that was me — and by me, I mean, me and my team — but that was like a red flag in a bull-fighting ring."

Danziger said growing Starwood Hotel & Resorts Worldwide as CEO was the polar opposite of his time at Wyndham. He had plenty of capital to work with to buy properties to grow Starwood into the company that was eventually bought by Marriott International in 2016 for $13 billion.

In 2015, Danziger assumed perhaps his most publicly facing role as a hotel executive, taking over as the first CEO of Trump Hotels not named Donald Trump. He held that position until 2022, a tenure that includes Trump's four-year term as President of the United States.

Danziger said that period represented the most unique challenges of his career, which he described as an "extraordinary life experience." He said he takes it as a point of pride that so much of the team he established at Trump Hotels is still there.

"The takeaway is we had really great people that really had to figure out how to manage the business through some really turbulent times — maybe not economically, necessarily, but we had 5,000 protesters blocking the Chicago hotel, and that's an issue," Danziger said. "A guy shooting up the [Trump National Doral Miami] lobby at 3:30 a.m. is an issue."

Danziger said each day was unique — he wasn't used to having Secret Service agents hanging around. From a business perspective, the perception of the brand posed the greatest challenges.

"We went through a period where 50% of potential customers ruled us out, not because we weren't the right hotel and people, but they just didn't want the controversy that went with it," he said.

Because of those challenges, the people running Trump Hotels forged especially strong bonds, Danziger said, adding that he remains close with the former president's children.

"I really do feel a kinship, particularly with Ivanka and Eric," he said. "They were terrific to work with. Not so much with Don [Jr.], not because he wasn't good to work with, but he was a little less involved than the other two."

Danziger left Trump Hotels two years ago to take over as chief executive of Braintree, an investment group based in Boise, Idaho. A year ago, he launched hotel management platform Resolute Road Hospitality.

In the transition, he said, he had the specific intention of spending more time with his family, including his son and grandchildren who already lived in Boise. He said he now plans to spend most of his time at his home in Arizona, but will keep his place in Boise, as well.

Danziger said while he'll remain on the board at Braintree, it was time for him to just do what he wants every day.

"I feel terrific [about the Braintree team]," he said. "They're great people that will take the germ of an idea I had originally and grow it whether I'm there or not."

After announcing his retirement, Danziger was immediately lauded as a "hotel industry legend" by several high-ranking executives and experts.

Daniel Lesser, who is co-founder, president and CEO of LW Hospitality Advisors, first met Danziger when the the latter was at DoubleTree Hotels in the 1980s.

"Eric’s talent, creativity, and graciousness are reflected in his terrific accomplishments at numerous hotel and other organizations during his 40-plus-year professional career.”

Jim Alderman, who previously served as Americas CEO at Radisson, worked with Danziger at Wyndham.

"Working for Eric was one of the most coveted rites of passage in our industry," he said. "From the front line of his hotels to board rooms with billionaires and royal families, no one commands a room like the boss, Eric A. Danziger."

Keith Pierce, Sonesta International's executive vice president and president of franchise and development, was also part of Danziger's Wyndham team.

"Eric’s leadership and vision for Wyndham’s global growth was transformational," he said. "He has an incredible ability to bring teams together and to create a corporate culture to achieve great results. Eric’s contribution’s to our industry are many, but most importantly his positive impact to those he helped along the way.”

Danziger said the common thread in all of his success is the incredibly talented people he surrounded himself with, some of whom followed him from stop to stop.

"It's been my career-long mantra that I want people of like hearts and different minds," he said. "You get like values and care and cheesy love — there's nothing wrong with saying you love what you do. Having those great people do great work is really that. The legacy I hope that I have is that I helped a lot of people do more than they thought they could."

In more than 50 years, Danziger has been asked to speak in front of college students and young professionals enough times to distill his advice down to a few bullet points:

• Be willing to take on the hard jobs.
• Know the right personas of people you want to work with.
• Have an openness to listen to everyone within your organization.

But he said the best advice he can give to young people in the industry is to find the right people around you to support you and lift you up.
Danziger said it's also key to have a life partner who is supportive of your career goals, adding his wife Jenny was willing to move for jobs 14 times when he was establishing himself in the '70s and '80s.

"It's important that somebody you're sharing your life with, that you guys are in sync," he said.

(Corrected on Feb. 8 to change a factual error in Daniel Lesser's work history.)

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