Bet the future on the future

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Simon Cooper is leading the second coming of the Ritz-Carlton brand around the world. He talks to Tom Rubython about expansion plans in the Middle East and beyond.

If recession is a word in Simon Cooper's dictionary he seems not to overly care about its meaning. In the next few years Ritz-Carlton will more than double its size in the Middle East.

It is about to open a brand new hotel in Dubai's financial district and another in Cairo. There are two new hotels in Abu Dhabi, one in Riyadh and another in Cairo in the planning stage and for good measure it will double the size of the existing Ritz-Carlton on Dubai's Jumeirah beach.

By the end of 2012, there will be ten Ritz-Carltons open in the Middle East. It also has tentative plans to open in Kuwait, Oman, Morocco and Lebanon by 2015. By then there will be well over 100 Ritz-Carltons open across the world.

Consequently the president of the Ritz-Carlton hotel company is a very busy man indeed, trotting the globe in a seemingly continually exhausted state. He often works sixteen hour days and it is not uncommon for him to have ten external meetings in a single day - in fact it is the norm.

But in many ways his ridiculous work schedule is his own fault. He is a hands-on manager and personally presides over the operations, development and strategic positioning of the Ritz-Carlton hotels.  It is a job description that keeps him very, very occupied.

Cooper was a natural choice as the new president when Bill Marriott bought the Ritz-Carlton chain in 2001. When the sale was concluded its founding president, Horst Schulze quickly departed. Although Ritz-Carlton started in 1927 in Boston it was Schulze who turned it into an international brand in the early 1980s. Schulze was a legend in the hotel industry and the success of Ritz-Carlton spawned a host of imitators.

It made him a very hard act to follow. Schulze set the tone coining the brand's credo: "We are ladies and gentleman serving ladies and gentlemen."

Although Ritz-Carlton became the by-word for hotel luxury and won industry award after award for service and excellence, by the end of the 90's the brand began to falter. It was overwhelmed by competitors and changing consumer tastes. Schulze and his co-founder Bill Johnson decided it was time to bail out and the chain was sold to Marriott in 2001 when Schulze left.

The then 54-year-old Cooper was a veteran Marriott manager looking for the big challenge. An Englishman by birth he had emigrated to Canada in 1972 and was then the Marriott's top man in the country.

But Cooper, now 63, won't be remembered for his success expanding the company, he will be remembered for ripping up Schulze's legacy and effectively instigating brand heresy. As soon as he took the top job Cooper realised that every luxury hotel brand marketed itself in the same way. But it all really started at an eye-opening presentation from the Ritz-Carlton's new advertising agency, Team One, eight years ago.

Mark Miller, strategy director at the agency, showed Cooper and his colleagues, the current print adverts of the top twelve luxury chains, including Ritz-Carlton, but with blanked out logos. Miller asked them which were Ritz-Carlton adverts and they couldn't tell him. It was a defining indictment of the industry and evidence that in terms of marketing and approach all the luxury chains had morphed into one, recognisable only by their names.

That realisation made Cooper even more determined to rid Ritz-Carlton of the ‘coat and tie formality' the brand was, up to that point, famous for.

The hotels Cooper had inherited were from another era, distinguished by wood paneling, marble and heavy drapes. In fact every hotel looked more or less identical.

It was tasteful opulence and designed to cater for travelling Americans who knew what they wanted and knew they could find it in any Ritz-Carlton without exception. But in the mid 90's this concept started to falter as wealth became not only the preserve of the elderly and Americans.

Miller's presentation was a turning point and the truth dawned on Cooper that the great Ritz-Carlton brand, carbon copied in hotels all over the world, had begun to lose its appeal to the new breed of traveller who started to eschew overwhelming luxury as the reason to stay in a hotel.

The new breed of guest wanted to savour the experience as well luxuriate. The predictability the brand had thrived on until now was, in fact, becoming a hindrance. The new breed of traveller wanted anything but predictability.

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