The Future of Travel & Hospitality with Arne Sorenson, Marriott International | Salesforce

Oh, it's wonderful to be here. I'm just going to take you in for a second. So how many of y' all stayed in a hotel last night? Yay, hotels. Me too. How many of y' all feel like you live in hotels these days? Yeah, me too. Hotels to me especially. I was preparing for this wonderful conversation to come. I started to think about hotels in particular as a really unusual and special third place in the modern age. You don't really live there, but you kind of live there. You don't really work there, but you're kind of working there. Maybe you're going to sell the deal of your life. Maybe you're going to meet the person of your dreams. And we go there to be adventurous. We go there to relax. We go there to be productive. We go there to be royalty, kings and queens of the universe. And we're traveling at record rates these days, which is a good thing, but not always by choice, which is not a good thing. And we'll talk about that in a minute. So in a rapidly changing world, the hotel industry can be one of the most important case studies to think about how technology and empathy can make both the world better, but the experience of ourselves better. So our conversation partner today is a wonderful leader, Arnie Sorensen, who's the president and CEO of Marriott International, quite literally the largest hotel business in the world, with a portfolio of more than 6,500 properties, 30 leading brands in 127 countries, with 675,000 people, either franchisees or under management, and 110 million loyalty members like you and me. But he also leads with his heart. He is one of the most outspoken corporate leaders of the modern age. And I know as Salesforce people, you know how wonderful and powerful that can be. He's advocated publicly for the health and safety of the world while working diligently and effectively to create a more open and inclusive workforce. Here to talk about the future of travel and our lives and absolutely everything is Arne Sorensen.

Hello, everybody.

So I have to say my favorite part of my job these days is saying wonderful things about leaders when I know that they are listening to them. So thank you for that.

Thank you.

It's a real treat.

Very kind and generous words.

So let's talk about your travel habits because we just shared ours a little bit. I imagine that you travel quite a bit.

Yeah, I travel about 200 nights a year, maybe 225 nights a year, something like that. But I love it and I think all the tips are easier when you like travel.

That's true, but I mean, you're spanning the world. What are your three biggest tips? And then we'll get into the world here.

Well, they all can be summed up with go local, get on local time immediately. And in fact, you can do that a little bit on your flight, on the way over. If you're going to Europe, sleep, because you're landing in the morning. And when you get there in the morning, don't go to bed, get some exercise, stay up. Going to Asia, I will stay up on the planes because typically you arrive in the evening.

That's hard.

And that's a bit of a gut gut sort of thing. You just got to force yourself to stay up when you get there, you're tired, exercise, go to bed, you get the best night's sleep. But be on the local time zone, eat the local food, get out and see the sights. Don't let yourself be living as if you're still at home because then you're in neither place. You're in sort of never never land. But local time, exercise, those are probably the two things that are most profound.

So let's dig into your big picture vision for the hotel business and hospitality, particularly when it comes to technology. Can you tell us a little bit about how you think about the shiny future of travel while preserving the essential human element of the experience of travel?

Yeah, let's start with the latter piece of that because I think that the travel has evolved. What we all want as travelers has changed significantly in the last couple of decades. 25 years ago when I started traveling, or 35 years ago, maybe when I started traveling for business, we wanted not to be disappointed with where we stayed. We wanted a decent sized room, a clean room, comfort, no disappointment. And the business travel was a business travel trip. Right. So let me be in a place where I want to work today. I think we are blending work and leisure all the time and we want an experience that's intense. So I don't want the same room that I stayed in in Asia last week. I want something that reflects San Francisco, for example. If I'm here, I want local food, I want an experience, even if I'm also on a work trip. And so we've got to make sure that we are driving that experience. It is a human to human business. Yes, there will be some impact of automation, but it will not probably be fundamental. People still want to sort of experience the places that they're in. So many of us, I think, love travel because we get to come back and tell stories about it. And so we want to make sure we preserve that, that we are welcoming people from everywhere, by people or with people from everywhere. And so that piece cannot change. I think we want to use technology, though, in a way that says how do we make it simpler for you not just to make a reservation or to earn points from that reservation, but to connect with experiences that you can have in that market, to have your room customized to some extent that would be easier to do in a luxury property, maybe than a lower rated property, but still have a room that reflects the fact that we know you. If you've stayed with us before, we should know something about what you like and let that be. And then also have technology that allows you to communicate with a hotel. Think about where the landlines are now. Left hotel rooms.

Right, right.

It's like the only place that we have landlines. Part of that is because you need it for security reasons or for life safety reasons if there's a fire or alarm. But part of that is we haven't done a very good job in allowing you to take the device, you want to use your phone and communicate with the hotel while you're in the hotel. And so those are some of the areas that we're doing a lot of work in.

So what would you say has been your biggest bet when it's come to technology?

Well, that's a good question. I think the. We spent a lot of money on technology. We're spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year. It is mostly about investing in the loyalty and reservations platform. They're big bets, but they're not risky bets in this same way. I think that the biggest bet that sort of has some risk in it, which is not unrelated to this, was our acquisition of Starwood a couple of years ago.

13 billion.

$13 billion. Biggest deal by a lot that Marriott's ever done. We were a $20 billion company when we bought them. So, you know, it's risking a fair amount of the company. And while it isn't at its core, maybe a technology bet, it was a bet on the loyalty program. We said if we can bring these two companies together and have a bigger ecosystem for our customers, that they are really our customers. And we could say to them, why would you stay anywhere else? Why would you stay anywhere else? That would be a good thing. We could know them better. We could essentially take two companies that were investing in separate loyalty and technology platforms and invest in one and by doing that, drive some of these features around customization and personalization and communications that we know we've got to get to.

So what are some of the. You mentioned risks? What would be some of the riskier elements of technology for you? And we'll get to where you're using Salesforce in a second. Virtual reality comes to mind. The fact that you know me when I come into a property is delightful when I come into a property, but yet it's creepy when I'm on Facebook, that kind of thing. How are you walking that fine line?

Yeah, that's an interesting one. You've got two. Two examples I'd use today. One is a regulatory one. So we are increasingly living in a world in which data will be required to be maintained in the country of residence of your customer. GDPR in Europe is probably the most profound Chinese heading the same way. California, of course, passed a law last year. All of this is going to have some impact on where we can keep the information we have about you and to some extent how we mine it. Can we mine it through pure anonymous tools, which probably we can do some of. But. So that's an area of risks. I think a second one, and this sort of gets to the thing you were referring to in your question. We have a number of hotel rooms that have got voice devices in them with both Apple and with Amazon, and I will hear from customers occasionally. I don't want that thing in my room because I think you're listening to us. Right. And you know, I've got four adult children. I talk to them about this. They've got these devices in their apartments. I've got these devices in my closet. Never taken out of the box. Maybe it's a little bit about age, but, you know, it does prove this point. Can we be confident that that device only turns on when I want to order room service?

Right.

Or is it somehow on and listening otherwise and that we're going to work through as a society? I mean, I think Marriott can have a role in testing that with our customers. We'll have some customers that say, I don't want any part of it. But I think collectively we will get either comfortable with this and it will be everywhere, or we'll decide that somehow it goes over the line a little bit and it won't be everywhere.

So you mentioned age, and I know that the world is traveling in ways that it never has before. How are you thinking about creating custom experiences for a young Chinese couple or an aging baby boomer or a business travel who's coming from a previously banned country? These are the things, when I think about the Enormity of the ways that you have to think about serving people. It's fascinating and almost overwhelming.

Yeah, it's interesting. Get asked questions about millennials all the time. And I think it is dead wrong to assume millennials like the same thing and that somehow collectively, they like different things than the boomers liked and that the boomers all liked the same thing. Actually, when you look at the data that we get to see, you will see that we are all different from each other. We might be born on the same date, and we're still different from each other. And so it's not about a generational change. It is instead about saying back to where we started. How do we know you better so we can give you the tools that you want to use when you travel, give you the food that you want when you travel. One of the things we've been doing with a Chinese traveler, and those numbers are enormous. Fifteen years ago, a million outbound trips from China a year. Last year, 135 million, and they're going to 500 million. And the first things that we want when we travel to a strange place, whether we're Chinese or Americans or what have you, we want the comfort elements. At the times of day when comfort is most important, think breakfast. Think about your news, which has gotten to be much easier because we all carry our news with us. Think sometimes about the bed and the way that that works. Slippers, we talk about fruit, the Japanese and Chinese travelers, because they love their slippers. But you've got to make sure that language and breakfast food particularly are there to welcome people. And beyond that, you start to get to sort of unique attributes. What is it that you want when you travel and that technology will help us all.

So as you're talking, I write a daily column on race and culture. For the last two and a half years. It has been a crazy time to think about this and to write about it every day. But I've studied companies who are doing a good job on creating an inclusive workforce, which we're going to spend a little more time later on. But it occurs to me too, that by welcoming so many different kinds of people from around the world, you're almost a natural condenser of inclusive knowledge. How are you thinking about this in terms of training your staff and being not just from the local area, but understanding someone who's very different from them?

Yeah, I think to some extent we are a little bit self selective. You're there to serve because we're there to serve and we are welcoming people literally from everywhere and from. Think about that not just as describing the geographical source, but think about that as describing identity as well. We are an extraordinarily diverse group of people welcoming an extraordinarily diverse group of people every day. And if you're not interested in that, you're not likely to be working with us. And so that helps. I think it takes us a long way along the way. I think the second thing which is really useful to me, I've been CEO for six and a half years, but the company's 91 years old and it didn't use the words diversity and inclusion or words like it 91 years ago. But early on they said, take care of the associate, the associate will take care of the guest, and the guests will come back again and again. And what they meant by that was build careers for your people, achieve their potential no matter where they came from. My first exposure to the company was in the early 90s and in the boardroom. The stories told were about associates that had started at entry level jobs in hotels and become fancy executives. They were not stories about the blue chip schools that the fancy executives went to. And that is a cultural heritage, which is a really powerful one and something that we fight very hard to preserve because we want to make sure that no matter where you start, no matter who you are, you've got the ability to move and grow in your career. And that also will feed this inclusiveness, I think.

And you don't even have to be a Marriott to be the CEO.

You don't even have to be a Marriott to be the CEO. That's right.

This is a huge change for this company. You're the first non family member. You're not a family member.

Correct. Right.

Not to take the helm. What was that like? How was that process?

Well, it was great. And in a sense, from the inside, it's less revolutionary than it feels like from the outside. The outside. So six and a half years as CEO. I've been at the company for 22, and before getting there, I represented Mariette as a lawyer, which was my last career, and got to know Mr. Marriott well. I worked with him essentially through that whole period of time and this transition evolved. So I had lots of years to sort of think, yeah, you know what, I might be following him. So I was learning from him. I was. It was crystal clear that I'm not a Marriott. I can't step into the job and pretend to be a Marriott. So I had to do the job in a way which is consistent with who I am and not pretend to be successful.

You blend in better than I might, though. I mean, you really do exemplify the kind of corporate executive track that ends up in leadership positions.

Yeah. And also great good fortune.

Yes, true too.

Good luck being at the right place at the right time. There were people at Marriott.

Hard work, hard work.

Easily done, this job. But the time wasn't right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I happened to be there at a time when it fell in my lap and of course I love it.

Well, and you know, it's, I think the part of the reason why it was such an interesting move because in a cynical world, it's easy to believe that a wealthy business person only holds space for their own relatives. We've seen that play out in public life recently in kind of an alarming way and that they're actually making room for a other talented people to come up. I think it's a beautiful thing.

Well, again, everybody deserves a shot.

I would be remiss if I didn't ask about your relationship with Salesforce and the kind of technology and how that their technology is helping you achieve your goals.

Yeah. Well, make sure you see the keynote this afternoon because Mark will talk about some of the things that we're doing together and we're really excited about the partnership we've got got with them. We think we have about 140,000 of our associates that are using Salesforce tools now. And of course it started with tools that our sales team used above property. But increasingly it is going to every screen at a hotel which tells the front desk agent who you are when you come in. And with the right. Populated with the right data.

Right. Which delights me but doesn't frighten me.

We want to make sure we don't freak you out, but instead welcome you. And that work is really exciting and it will be further enhanced in the near future with information we're getting from other sources that might tell us whether you're going to be late, whether your flight's delayed or whether there are other aspects of your travel that we should be mindful of when you show up.

That's extraordinary. So I wanted to talk a little bit, switch gears and talk about leading in the hospitality business and also this leading in the world. You wrote an extraordinary letter after the most recent presidential election that outlines some concerns that you had but ideas about how this country could continue on being an opening, a welcoming place. Could you tell us a little bit about why you wrote the letter and what was in it?

Yeah. So I write the week of the election. I wrote a letter to President Trump, who I'd never met, and in part because I didn't know him, I couldn't send it to him. So I put it on LinkedIn and described it as an open letter to President Trump. Election, of course, was on a Tuesday. My 89 year old mother had passed away on the Friday before. And so I was writing that week anyway. I was writing sort of her story, which we were going to use at the memorial service coming up for her. And as an 89 year old, died in 2016. She was a depression era child, World War II adult, essentially. She and my father had gone to Japan and lived there for 13 years, which is where I was born. And so I was sort of telling that story, which was about her and was very personal, but was also about the era that they had lived through. And then Trump is elected on the Tuesday. And I'm surprised by that, as many people are, and thinking, okay, both for me personally, how do you get your head around? We have a new leader who has said certain things. What would you really advocate that he do in a way that is consistent with what he's said? And then, of course, we have our own audience of 700,000 people, roughly, who wear our name badge every day, who were thinking, okay, what does this mean for me? What does it mean for the company? And all of those things sort of went into it. But I wrote the letter for me first to sort of force me to think about it, for our associates second, and as a distant third, maybe a notion that somebody might read it in the administration. And you know, just to pick on one example in there, there is a focus on. It's a short letter and still, I think, available on LinkedIn, but there's a paragraph about keeping the government out of the bedroom and the bathroom. Bathroom, of course, because of what had been going on in North Carolina particularly. That is a conservative formulation of a what an inclusive voice for the LGBT community.

Right.

Conservative in the sense that you're saying, let me be who I am privately. And I used those words because, again, the audience was, you've got a new president, he's not going to come out and be a flag waiver for the LGBT community. How do we marshal an argument that is going to make sure that we retain the progress we've made so far and we continue that progress. And so throughout that, it is an effort to try and say, here's policies, which I think will. Will be constructive and useful, and here's why. They are policies you, President Trump, should feel like you could adopt without being inconsistent with the campaign that you've run.

What was the response to your posting the letter?

Well, it's. I hear about it all the time, and I get.

It's a good letter.

I travel, of course. I'm traveling all the time. I'm in our hotels all the time. And, you know, every week I get an associate who will give me a hug and say thank you for doing that letter or, you know, something else along the same lines. And so from that perspective, and it was, you know, well, read. I did. I've met President Trump twice now since I was in the White House two weeks ago. As far as I can tell, he's never read the letter. Now, I didn't say, did you read my letter?

What a missed opportunity. Well, if he had written it, he would have brought it, made you read it right in front of him, perhaps. Who knows? What were you in the White House for?

This last visit was for a conversation about inbound international travel to the United States.

Yeah. So I imagine that the travel ban was mentioned and things like that travel.

Ban we talked about. And of course, the countries that the travel ban applies to literally are not big source markets for travel to the United States. But the voice that comes from the United States is a big voice. And one of the things I said to President Trump is, you know, we're not here to argue against security. We obviously need to be protected. We're not here necessarily to argue about what immigration policy should be. We're not talking about people moving to the United States. We are talking about, do we communicate a welcome to the rest of the world to come here to do business, to come here to see the place, to come here to see people. By the way, everybody who comes to the United States, not everybody, but overwhelmingly the people who come to the United States go home with a more positive view of the United States than if they didn't come here in the first place. So there's sort of a soft diplomacy. So I said, yeah, you can talk about security and immigration, but be careful that your voice is not heard by the rest of the world as saying, you're not welcome here.

Well, I appreciate you.

And he actually, to his credit, I was a little, maybe close to the line. But he said, I understand that, and we should be able to do something about that.

Well, good for you for raising it, because you really are in a position which is something I hadn't fully considered before. As I mentioned before, I prepared for this conversation that you are really in such an unusual position to impact really pressing social issues like immigration, like trafficking. Could you tell us a little bit about your work there?

Yeah, we have, I think, trained, I don't know, three or four hundred thousand of our associates now on how to watch for trafficking. And it's a tough thing because you are essentially telling folks to keep their eyes open, often in uncertain circumstances. The folks who are going to be, you know, visibly restraining somebody are probably not going to check into our hotels. That's probably not what. That's not the picture we're going to see. We're going to see something that's much more nuanced than that. But we know that it is happening. We know that it is devastating to the folks that are victims of this. All of us want to make sure we do what we possibly can do to help it. And the stories have been pretty interesting. Some stories from the rest of the world. You know, I think probably many of us here assume this is a story about, you know, the sex trade coming out of Asia or coming out of some part of the developing world, and not necessarily something here. We've had stories here in California where miners have been grabbed in a parking lot and. And they show up in a hotel. And we've had associates who are heroes, who have seen, you know, there's something about that picture that doesn't make sense. And they consult with each other and they call the authorities. And, you know, if you could get a handful or a few handfuls of this, which have an impact, that's pretty powerful.

You're sort of describing the dream of technology that we were originally thinking about even a couple of decades ago, that it makes for seamless experience for employee and guest. It makes things easier so that the human beings can actually interact with each other and pay attention to each other to see what they actually need.

The other place we're spending a lot of time is in the airport process. And so if you think about, it's a pretty young crowd here, so probably not too many. Remember, as I do, when I started traveling, there was no security in airports. I practiced law downtown Washington and would fly out of National Airport. And I could leave the office about 20 minutes before takeoff time and get to the airport and be on the plane and simply walk right onto the plane with essentially no security. And now if you pause and you look, look at sfo, if you're leaving from there tomorrow or Thursday or Friday, and you see the amount of infrastructure that we've got on security, 99.9% of us represent no risk it's actually, the number's probably even higher than that. But we all go through more or less the same process. Yes. If you're TSA pre, maybe it's a little bit abbreviated. If you buy clear, it's a little bit abbreviated, but you're still going through the same process. And there ought to be a way where we say we know who you are and you don't have to do anything.

See, this makes me nervous.

Does it?

This makes me more nervous than having the cookie waiting for me, which I love at the hotel.

Yeah, because.

Yeah, because it doesn't feel like you control the space. It feels like you. Like I'm not in your home anymore. I'm in a public space that has under multiple jurisdictions. I only signed up for clear under duress because I was late to get home. My kids were going to show up. You know, it's one of these crazy traveler things. It's like, fine, here's my 30 bucks and here's my thumbprint. It's like, now you own a piece of my identity. So these things. And I know it's you and is it Accenture? Is it?

Yep.

Companies I know well and trust. But I am confessing here in front of our friends that it makes me nervous. We're an entity that I, as irrational as it sounds, that I doesn't seem attached to a place where I am, knows intimate details about my. Whether it's my thumbprint or just my movement or my activities.

They've already got it.

I know. It's over. It's over.

I mean, I'm a journalist.

I'm a fear based animal. I'm just confessing.

I'm with you on this. In many respects, it's over, but they've already got it. And this is not about us getting the data. This is about governments who are running this process. And already they're taking our pictures.

I know. It's over already.

They're taking our fingerprints. They know it all. And if they're going to know it all, they might as well use it in a way that helps us lead our lives better.

Well, would you ever consider running for public office? Because that would make me feel better.

Would you vote for me?

I would.

There we go. Okay.

There, I said it.

I've got a great job. I love it.

I knew you were going to say that. But let's go back to a happy place. Let's talk about the Love Travels movement or the hashtag and the promotion. Tell us a little bit about that campaign and why you.

Yeah. So Love Travels, we've been out, my team's here six years, maybe five or six years, something like that. And it started really with the LGBT community as a way of marketing, celebrating, communicating. And I think we have since not just embraced that, but used it to sort of embrace all of diversity, inclusion around Love. And it is. It's really fun. It's really fun stuff because it is a way of talking about the things I've already mentioned. How do we embrace everybody? How do we genuinely welcome everybody? So often when we're traveling, particularly for personal reasons, we're traveling with a loved one. They are the most important occasions of our lives. Our honeymoons, our anniversary trips, our bachelorette parties, you know, whatever it is. And you put all that together and say, how do you come up with something that is feel good, but inclusive and powerful and celebratory? And that's why Love Travels, we're still using five or six years after it launched. Marketing campaigns often tend to have a shorter shelf life than that, but this is one that just feels right to us.

Yeah, yeah. And times have been very odd. It's excellent. Speaking of diversity and inclusion, you have a remarkably diverse board, which is wonderful to see. You've set some pretty aggressive diversity and inclusion benchmarks, including with your franchisees, which seem to be on track. And I appreciate that it was sort of baked in from the beginning in terms of taking care of the associate. But this is really unusual. As someone who studies corporate diversity for a living, this has been. You are. Outside of all the benchmarks here. How do you think you've done it?

I think the cultural heritage is a big piece of it. This business about how do you succeed in your work, no matter where you come from. And that means you're not picking from a. Only Wharton grads, for example, for finance jobs, or fill in the blank for various disciplines. You're basically saying, who are the folks? Yes, of course, we want people who are beautifully trained and educated and. And smart, but we also want people who are learning through their experiences and don't necessarily have to check all sorts of boxes in order to be considered for jobs. And that cultural heritage, I think, is really important. I think, too, we've been. We, of course, have measured this and had set targets. We've had a board management committee called Committee for Excellence, which is about diversity and inclusion for, I think, 20 years. And that is a selection of our directors plus management, getting together probably twice a year, maybe three times a year, and setting targets and measuring against them and making sure that we are doing those things. I think we've also had really good fortune. We have great diverse board members. We had relationships with all of them and it worked for us. Half of my direct reports are women. None of them have their jobs because they're women. And I feel lucky and fortunate that the talent we had in the team to choose from made them the right folks to choose. And of course, the success feeds on itself. So women leaders in the company see these very senior women execs and say, I like women what I see. And this makes me love this place even more. And so that you know that all it all sort of builds on it.

To get back to the technology piece it is. The world is changing rapidly and we all have to think about that both as threats and opportunities. But the technology with which we're using and developing is also changing very rapidly. I had interviewed a senior executive at a big retailer who was working on integrating the customer experience from mobile to tablet. So it all felt the same. And it was a brand new job and he was struggling the transition, as we often do, and said that the advice that he'd gotten for his peers in different companies was expect to lose 70% of the executives you have now. And it was such a shocking piece of advice to me that on Monday, these extraordinary people that you were working with, who had been excellent in every way by Tuesday, because you have a new initiative or new piece of technology, are no longer up to the job. So I wanted to run that by you because I am horrified by what that means for the workforce and also what does it mean for technology adoption? Are we really going to be disrupting things and people in the best way if we're not able to bring our leaders along?

Yeah. I mean, it feels to me like there are a few questions wrapped into that conversation. Part of it is about do we stay with a company, do we stay with a mission or a cause for a decent period of time? And if we don't, why are we not saying it? Is it purely about wages and benefits, the economic aspects of it, or is it something else about the culture of the place where then engaged with? And I think if it's the former, that should be fixable. Right? We should be saying, okay, well, wait a second, what is it we need to do in order to make sure we're keeping people from a pay and benefits perspective? If it's the latter, it should be fixable too, but real effort has got to be put into it. Do you feel. Do I feel personally connected to the work of Marriott I do do most of the folks in the company, from the senior jobs to the most junior jobs, I think many of them actually do. Now, we, of course, still have turnover, but one of the advantages of a family heritage company, a company in the hospitality space, a company which is focused on it. We're not perfect, by the way. We've got lots of things we've got to stay focused on. But if I can connect to that company in a way that feels personal to me, if it feels like the company cares about me personally, I'm much more likely to say this is a place I want to continue to, even if it's in technology, reinvent and disrupt.

The technology we've done before, push through the hard transitions. So for my purge at Fortune, I'm increasingly around leaders and executives at every level, actually, who are more likely to do just that, to say publicly that they care about certain things. They care about not only their employees, but they care about their impact on the world. Is that something that you're saying too? And is it? Particularly as the complications of the world are coming up and it's everything from immigration to migration, climate change. We haven't talked about climate change, the opioid epidemic. It's just all employers are dealing with all things now.

That's right.

What's your best advice for someone operating at any level to better link their authentic will to have better impact with their daily jobs?

When we started our Green Council focused on sustainability, obviously about 12 or 13 years ago, maybe 14 years ago, we had a number of environmentalists come in in and say, here's what's happening externally in the world. Here's some things you can think about. And I won't name names because they were private conversations, but I asked a couple of them, tell me how we should think about what we do in this space. How much money should we spend? Is it a percentage of what we're spending? Is it philosophically? Give me advice about how we go about this. And the most powerful advice was, you should do any. Every single thing that drives sustainability that makes economic sense. And you should hold the environmental industry to deliver tools that are economically replicable, because if we adopt lower standards, it's too hard over a sustained period of time for companies to do that. Yeah. You may have a CEO who loves the space, who's going to say, I'm going to force it to happen. But there's a long way of getting an answer to your question. I don't think that that is necessarily gospel, that answer, but I think there's some wisdom in it. And, you know, a couple of things that we've done. For example, we talked early on about low VOC paint, volatile organic compounds, which is obviously better environmentally, was more expensive than the traditional paint. But we went to the paint suppliers and they said, listen, if you'll buy only low VOC paint, we'll sell it to you for the same expense because we could deliver the volume. That's a great thing about being at a big company is you can actually use your mass to say, we're going to do things that we couldn't do if we were on our own. But again, if I'm a senior exec, a mid level exec starting employee at a company, I can look around and say, okay, what are we doing that does not have a positive sustainable impact? What are the things we could do to change the way it works? And does it save money? Does it cost any more money? Does it impact the way we perform our job? And most of us can look around and find opportunities to drive better sustainability simply by being thoughtful about it. And nobody will fight you. Nobody will fight you. Now, if you come in and say, I have a whole new approach to doing business which is going to be more sustainable, but either way the cost is 2x, then you're going to have a hard time getting that through. Now, it might still be worth having that dialogue, but again, be the change agent for us to have enough impact. Yes, we can do some things globally, but we need champions in every single hotel who say, I can see what's happening in my hotel around energy usage or water or trash. Those are the three big areas. And I can see places where in this precise location, we have opportunities to do better.

So we only have a few minutes left and I want to make sure that we hit everything that you wanted to hit today. But. But I did want to ask you about your taking on a technology company directly into the home marketplace. Obviously, I'm talking about Airbnb here. Thomas, tell us a little bit about that thinking and how much of a risk do you think this is for your core business?

So for those who don't know, Airbnb is in the home sharing business. Have you ever heard of Airbnb? I think a local company here, we of course have watched them and others since they started. And by and large, Airbnb has offered a different product than a hotel room. And it's different in a number of respects, but I think for the bulk of their product, the difference has been it is a lower cost stay. Yes, of Course, there's a local flavor and sometimes that can be a piece of it. But often when you listen to travelers and say, where did you book last night? Why did you stay there? The answer is going to be, well, it was cheaper. San Francisco was really expensive during Dreamforce week, and every hotel was full and I could get a place that was cheaper, maybe materially cheaper, but maybe also not as good as a hotel room. And we don't really want to be in the business of providing the cheapest accommodation. We've never done that. We don't have a budget brand, for example. We want to make sure we're providing value, but we're providing value sort of in the top, sort of the midpoint of the market, all the way up through luxury. But we watched this space and said, but there is a bit of this business, which is a whole home. I've got four kids. When my wife and I go travel, which we love to do, sometimes we end up in a house because we want to have another family of four, five, six, seven with us. Suddenly you're needing six or seven bedrooms. Hotels are not built great for that. And so we said, let's start in London and let's do a curated whole home collection. Now, a home in London might be a flat in a building, obviously, but with multiple bedrooms, with services, that cut the risk that you're going to end up with a host that's delivering a product which is not good connection to the loyalty program, and it's not huge. We have 200 units in London. We have 1.3 million hotel rooms today, so you can see an order of magnitude that's not very material. But I suspect we'll grow into additional markets, albeit at that whole home space where I think our customers will say, yes, that's a new and different product from the traditional hotel room and we're glad you're there.

Excellent. Very good. So we're almost out of time, and I thought we could end up where we started. Which is your vision for the travel future. And now that we've woven in some of the big challenges that we're facing, it's political challenge, it's climate, it's migration, it's war. What is your. What do you see the role of the hospitality industry in addressing some of these issues or just making the world more welcoming?

Yeah, this is your.

I'm going to use this for your presidential campaign. Deliver it straight to the audience, please.

I love this business and I love this business because it does appeal to our better selves. I think in lots of respects, not exclusively. I mean, I think sometimes we can, we can splurge in a way that maybe is a little bit selfish, but that's okay too. But it appeals to our better selves in the sense that I think we are collectively pretty open minded. We have forces sometimes that drive us to be close minded. But when you talk to people who have had a chance to travel or who have diverse friendships, everybody feels better by both of those things almost. I've never heard anybody who has said I didn't appreciate going to see something that I hadn't seen before, or I didn't appreciate meeting somebody who's not part of my obvious cohort, the neighborhood I grew up in or the school I went to. And I think collectively we want that. There's. There's a book I just read called the Soul of America. Jon Meacham just wrote it. Great American historian. And essentially he looks at political leaders through our 250 year history and those that have appealed to our better natures, often with beautiful rhetoric. Fdr, Martin Luther King, a whole bunch of obvious names are in this Lincoln. As folks who have essentially said, here is a vision that we should be pursuing together. We can't in the hospitality space be that lofty, but we can say we will fight every single day to help you go experience the world, go experience the town next door, go experience through a local vacation that you're taking, something about a new experience for you. And we can do that in an environment in which we will fight every day to make sure everybody's welcome to work there, to visit there, to eat there, to meet there. And in our little space, at least, hopefully we can appeal to our better natures.

Beautiful. Arnie, thank you so much. What a pleasure.