“After 28 years with Starwood I was a serious player in a big corporation but now I am a CEO I feel like a general, which comes with a lot of responsibility,” says Thomas Willms, who has been CEO of Deutsche Hospitality since January.
It was not as if he went from one business card to the other. When the Marriott-Starwood deal was finalised, Willms, who had been Starwood’s senior vice president and regional director East & Central Europe, based at the Hotel Imperial in Vienna, decided to move on.
“At the end of January 2017, I was free. During those years with Starwood I had never had more than two weeks’ holiday. The first thing my wife and I did was a two-week Ayurvedic cleanse. Then we traveled around the world for four months, stopping off in the USA to see where we had got married in 1986,” he recalled.
Back home in Vienna, he faced reality. “It was definitely not time to retire, and becoming COO of Deutsche Hospitality sounded like the ideal job. I knew the company, its fine reputation and many of its people.”
Willms joined Deutsche Hospitality in June 2017, and when the incumbent CEO, Puneet Chhatwal, left in October 2017 he was asked by the company’s owners, the El Chiaty family, to babysit, in cooperation with Deutsche Hospitality’s CFO.
Appointed CEO in January, he realized immediately the need for a definite vision. This determination is shared with Deutsche Hospitality’s 12-member supervisory board, chaired by Ralf Corsten. “In a smaller company it is much easier to create and get things done at a quicker rate. But the responsibility is higher simply because of the less complicated company structure,” Willms explained.
“When it comes to digital, I think we are a super-yacht racing in front of the super-tankers of mega hotel groups. Deutsche Hospitality has an innovation lab in Frankfurt, and we can attract top technical minds away from such giants just because, with us, they can have more freedom to create. I know we need more and more digital advantage, and we have great hopes for our two month-old CRM system. Our app, currently available in our Jaz hotels and most of our IntercityHotels, will be rolled out company-wide by the end of the year. We are also developing a specific Steigenberger app.”
Across its brands – Steigenberger Hotels and Resorts, IntercityHotel, Jaz and the new-look Maxx by Steigenberger – Deutsche Hospitality has 104 open properties, including nine resorts in Egypt (Willms wants more resorts, specifically in Europe’s Mediterranean areas). Currently, 75 of the open hotels are in Germany.
“On any one night one of the Deutsche Hospitality brands has about 60% of the total occupied bed nights in the country,” he smiled, with satisfaction. City hotel stays average 1.7 nights.
Willms says one immediate challenge is to top up his talent portfolio. “It is honestly easier to find guests than staff. Germany’s low birth rate means that the nation is losing 500,000 from its workforce with every year. We are reaching out to such high unemployment nations as Spain and offering three-year apprenticeships, including immediate language classes.”
He is a team player, he says, and he is determined to build the best he can. At management level, a Top-20 team of VPs and division leaders meets four times a year, with a coach. “We never talk politics, but our themes are such topics as where we want to be in five years’ time and how to prepare for crises,” he shared.
Not being publicly traded means Deutsche Hospitality can be agile, moving quickly when needed, and the CEO does not have to do any deals under pressure. Another plus is that he was brought up in the privately owned hotel world, through both his mother’s and his father’s heritage, but a fascination with travel meant he himself turned away from running the Willms-owned property.
