Bill Marriott

On December 13, 2011, Marriott International put out a press release that most family companies never get to write. J.W. Marriott Jr., chairman and chief executive, then 79 and in his sixtieth year with the firm, told shareholders he had decided to recommend to the board that Arne Sorenson take over as CEO. Sorenson was a lawyer, recruited in 1996, who had run finance and then European operations before becoming president and chief operating officer in 2009. He became the third chief executive in the company's history, effective March 31, 2012. Bill Marriott stayed on as executive chairman.

In a Harvard Business Review piece in May 2013 he wrote that for decades he had expected one of his sons to become the third generation in charge, and that he had slowly concluded otherwise. He did not dress it up. The company he handed over reported revenue above $12 billion for 2011, with 3,718 properties in 73 countries under 18 brands and a development pipeline of more than 110,000 rooms. It had opened 210 hotels in that one year. The timeshare business had been spun off the month before the announcement.

Bill Marriott joined Hot Shoppes, Inc. in 1956, a year after Navy officer training and a wedding in the Salt Lake Temple, and went to work for a father who had lived through the Depression and did not want to borrow money. The restaurants threw off cash. Hotels needed loans. The son kept pushing, and in 1957 the company opened the Twin Bridges Motor Hotel in Arlington, Virginia, charging $9 a night plus a dollar for every extra person in the car. In January 1964 he was elected executive vice president and a director, and that November, at 32, president. He became chief executive in 1972 and chairman in 1985, the year his father died. Two decisions from those years explain the modern company more than any others. The first came in the late 1970s, when Marriott stopped trying to own its hotels and moved to managing and franchising buildings that belonged to other people, which took the real estate off the balance sheet and let the chain grow at a pace an owner-operator could not match. The second was the 1993 split of Marriott Corporation into Marriott International, the management and franchising business he kept, and Host Marriott, which took the property and which his brother Richard chairs today as Host Hotels & Resorts. Wikipedia also credits him with bringing revenue management, the practice of pricing rooms by demand, into the hotel trade. By 1997 the Deseret News could describe a $12 billion company managing more than 1,500 hotels under 10 brands, holding 3,400 food and facilities contracts and employing 225,000 people, with a stated goal of 2,000 hotels by the year 2000. He still inspected hotels himself, a habit he had picked up trailing his father through Hot Shoppes kitchens as a boy.

The Starwood purchase came under Sorenson, but with Bill Marriott still in the chair: announced in November 2015 at $13 billion, it closed on September 23, 2016 at $13.6 billion and produced a company with more than 5,700 properties and 1.1 million rooms. At his retirement from the board in May 2022, with the title chairman emeritus, the company's own biography counted roughly 8,000 properties across 30 brands in 139 countries and territories. Wikipedia's figures for 2025 are 9,361 properties, 1,706,331 rooms, 144 countries and revenue of $26.2 billion. However much of that you credit to the years after 2012, the base was built on his watch.

Marriott hotels keep a copy of the Book of Mormon in the room next to the Gideon Bible, a practice his father started, and in 1997 Bill Marriott told the Deseret News the company had given away 50,000 copies in the previous year. The same interview covered the harder question. Serving liquor troubled the family; the paper reported that the first three hotels opened in dry jurisdictions, and that the real decision came with a Philadelphia hotel, where he chose to serve it, in his words, "in good taste". His summary of the position: "we can be in the world but not of the world".

Marriott hotels gave away 50,000 copies of the Book of Mormon in 1996, by the company's own count.

His own record in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints runs longer than most executives'. He married Donna Garff in the Salt Lake Temple in June 1955. From 1982 to 1990 he was president of the Washington D.C. Stake, the same stake his father had presided over from 1948 to 1957, and by 1997 he had been called as an Area Authority. Inside the company he set up an 800-number resource line offering employees counselling in 15 languages, which the same 1997 report tied to lower turnover and absenteeism. Whether the two things are connected is for you to decide; he has never separated them in interviews.

• Former chairman of the President's Export Council; former director of General Motors, Georgetown University and the Mayo Clinic
• Trustee of the National Geographic Society and director of the U.S. Naval Academy Foundation
• Industry Leader of the Year, Broad College of Business, Michigan State, 2001; honorary doctorate, Weber State, May 4, 2006
• Icon of the Industry, Cornell School of Hotel Administration, June 2, 2009; Ernst & Young National Entrepreneur of the Year, November 19, 2016
• Author of Without Reservations: How a Family Root Beer Stand Grew into a Global Hotel Company (2013)

The board seat is gone, but the shares are not. Wikipedia currently puts his personal stake at 11.28 percent of Marriott International.