Emily: So in looking back at your career in preparation for our chat, Jon, I realized that you were talking about topics that get headlines like they’re innovations today, but you introduced these ideas over 20 years ago. Tourism and government, guest experience, and being an advocate for women. Let’s go back to the beginning. After growing up working in hotels, you graduated from Tufts and you started a career in TV at WBZ in Boston before joining Loews. Why did you do that?
Jon: So Emily, thank you for this opportunity and wonderful to see you on this side of the pond. I was a senior at Tufts and I decided that I was kind of tired of going to classes and I was able to work out an internship at WBZ TV, which in those days, this was fall 1975, was an NBC affiliate. And I spent my senior year, I got credit for it. I learned how to shoot film, edit film. I became a producer. And when I graduated from Tufts in May of 1976, they offered me a job. And I spent the next three years as a full-time employee. I produced children’s shows and public affairs shows, and I produced the pregame Patriots show for a couple of years, and the Patriots actually offered me a job as head of public relations when I announced that I was going to be leaving in the summer of 1979. But it was at that time that I decided to come back to Loews Hotels. And I started in January of 1980 as a sales rep working for a wonderful gentleman who taught me a lot about the hotel business, who taught me how to sell, who taught me how to market, and then various other roles have led me to a 45-year career at Loews Hotels, which I am getting ready to exit from because I have announced my retirement at the end of this year on December 31st, 2025.
Emily: Wow, amazing. Let’s talk, you wrote a book called Chocolates on the Pillow Aren’t Enough. You were always ahead of the time when it comes to guest experience. Talk to me about the evolution of that in your mind.
Jon: So I tried to really break down the guest experience. When you make a decision about traveling, whether you’re with your family, your significant other, your spouse, your kids, on a business trip, personal trip, you have made a conscious decision to leave the safety and security of your own home and you entrust those responsibilities to a hotel company. Loews Hotels is a much smaller competitor than the biggest names in the industry. When you look at the Hiltons, Hyatts, Marriotts, Accors of the world, you’re talking thousands of hotels, hundreds of thousands of team members. And we have 24 hotels, we have 14,000 rooms, and we’re in very specific locations. So early in my role as CEO, I worked with our team on understanding the relationship between the guest and the property. And in my first book, The Power of We, I talk about building relationships with three different constituencies. First and foremost, your guests. Obviously, they’re your stock and trade. You need them to stay in your hotels, pay the bills. And the way you make them happy is not necessarily because you’ve got a beautiful lobby and a fitness center. It’s your team members that are responsible for those thousands of interactions during somebody’s visit. And then community. It’s very important to understand your responsibility to the community where you operate your business. So that second group, team members, we can’t do anything without them. When I would sit in my office on Madison Avenue running Loews Hotels, I wasn’t checking people in. I wasn’t carrying their bags. I wasn’t cooking the food. I wasn’t doing any of that. It’s the team members who make the difference. So at Loews Hotels, we really try to understand what their needs are. They need to have a sense of what we expect of them. And it’s that kind of relationship that I think makes us a little bit different than some other hotel companies. There are so many good operators out there. I have a lot of respect for the people who run this industry because they’re good at what they do. It might be on a different scale from us, but there’s a lot of very smart women and men out there who are running hotel companies, hopefully more women in the future, but they know what they’re doing. They offer a great product and it’s very hard to find your space in a very crowded industry. And I think at Loews Hotels, we’ve been able to do that once again, because we do have an eye towards design in the kinds of hotels that we build and operate, but we care a lot about our team members.
Emily: Yeah, yeah, I remember that as an employee, all the great events you would do to celebrate the Lowe’s legends amongst the staff and leadership. And that definitely stands out to me as some of the more memorable events that we had. And you say that it’s about this connection between the customer and this experience. During your tenure at Lowe’s Hotels, is there any specific program that stands out in your mind?
Jon: I think when we changed the working area of a hotel, which we used to call the back of the house, and we changed it to the heart of the house. And I think that was a significant moment for us because it showed how much we care about our team members. It was just sort of a headline, a neon sign that when you’re in the heart of the house, you’re with your colleagues and your managers will be walking through. They’ll get you ready for the day, they’re there to answer any questions. And I think that showed how much we believe in our team members and the understanding of how important they are. We’ve got a lot of different programs like everybody else. We have a very strong HR team that demonstrates our care for our team members every day. But in that regard, many hotel companies are doing that. But because of our size, there are some things that we can do. There are a lot of things that we can’t do because we can’t afford to roll out these very costly programs. But we’ve managed to create an environment where our team members feel that they’re welcome. They can talk to us, they can ask us questions, they can make comments. But what we need them to do is contribute to a successful business because this is a business and we are part of a public company at Loews Hotels and we have a responsibility to our shareholders and I think we as a small operator balance the needs of running a profitable business with making sure that our team members feel wanted.
Emily: Yeah, I always felt that there was a real emphasis on the employee experience. And as you say, if you have happy employees, they will serve the guests very well.
