Anthony Capuano

CEO of Marriott International

Anthony “Tony” Capuano is chief executive officer of Marriott International, Inc. In this role, Capuano presides over the world’s largest hospitality company and some of the most iconic brands in travel.

Capuano joined Marriott in 1995 and was instrumental in its steady growth over the years, which culminated in the acquisition of Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide in 2016. The company now has more than 7,600 properties across 133 countries and territories and 30 brands. It also has the travel industry’s largest customer-loyalty program, Marriott Bonvoy, which has more than 147 million members.

Before his appointment as CEO in February 2021, Capuano was group president of Global Development, Design and Operations Services, where he led the strategic unit growth of all Marriott’s brands while overseeing the global design team as well as Marriott’s global operating standards and protocols for thousands of properties around the world. Capuano was also responsible for oversight of the EDITION Hotels, a unique concept in the luxury lifestyle hotel space conceived by hotelier Ian Schrager and Marriott International.

Capuano began his Marriott career as part of the Market Planning and Feasibility team, where he helped the company assess the overall economic viability of new and existing hotels, balancing the company’s interests with the needs of hotel owners and developers, investors, lenders and operators.

That role prepared him to lead Marriott’s development efforts in the Western United States and Canada for its full-service hotel brands. Later, his responsibilities expanded to include North America, the Caribbean and Latin America. In 2009, Capuano assumed global development responsibility. He began overseeing global design in 2014 and global operations in January 2020.

Capuano earned a bachelor’s degree from Cornell University in Hotel Administration. He is an active member of the Cornell Hotel Society, The Cornell School of Hotel Administration Dean’s Advisory Board, as well as the Business Roundtable and the American Hotel and Lodging Association’s IREFAC Council. Additionally, Capuano is an active member of the board of directors of Save Venice, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving the artistic heritage of Venice, Italy. He resides in Potomac, Maryland, with his wife and daughter.

Why We Honored Him:

Since becoming CEO, Tony is emphasizing the importance of Marriott’s culture and connecting with associates. Three months on the job, he hosted a global town hall on the subject of culture — and how it has buoyed the company during these difficult days.

When Tony first took on the role of CEO during the COVID-19 pandemic, he wasn’t able to travel immediately to see the hotel associates. More recently, he has been able to get out and tour hotels and meet associates. That face-to-face connection, which is a hallmark of Mr. Marriott’s leadership style, is something that Tony also embraces.

Tony continues the legacy of Marriott’s founding family, which we honored in June 2021 with this tribute to Bill Marriott:

“Success isn’t final.” This provocative statement is one of the guiding beliefs behind Bill Marriott Jr.’s success. As he also notes, “Change is good. Not always easy, but good and necessary. Getting too comfortable with the status quo can set you up for failure.”

Still active as executive chairman of the board at Marriott International after more than 40 years as CEO of his family's hotel chain, Bill always practiced a famously a hands-on style that he called "management by walking around." Nearing 90 years old, he still does plenty of walking, visiting upward of 200 hotels a year.

The No. 1 reason, he says, is “it is very beneficial to me because I get to see what’s going on.” And the most important part of all is “to visit with the people and let them know that there’s a guy named Marriott around and that I care about them and I’m interested in them. It’s in my DNA. My father used to visit the restaurants. I’ve been doing the same thing with the hotels ever since I became president in 1964.”

He makes it a point to meet all his associates, guests and managers. He also ensures that he talks to everyone involved in the running of the hotel -- from the top associates to the bellman.

Often asked the secret of Marriott’s success, he credits the Marriott philosophy, which is to really care about every single person working for Marriott. Talk about Social Capital! And that includes caring about their opinions. “If you don’t consult your staff, your advisors -- and even your opponent -- you will be the only one left in the room.”

Despite being the founder’s son, Bill credits his people skills with his ascension to CEO upon his father’s retirement, and some of that clearly had to do with his willingness to get his hands dirty — literally.

“When I became the head of Marriott, in 1964, many people were surprised,” he relates. “I was only 32 and had worked at the company full-time for just eight years [starting as kitchen staff for four years]. My father, who’d started the business in 1927 with a root beer stand in Washington, D.C., before moving into restaurants and then hotels, had an experienced executive vice president working for him who many thought would succeed him. He was 20 years older than I was, and when it came to finance, he was brilliant. But he was a micromanager. He spent a lot of time marking up contracts, redoing the work of the company’s lawyers. He didn’t have good people skills and didn’t understand the operation of the business.”

A senior director on the board, on whom Marriott Sr. relied heavily, believed the VP would be the wrong choice and urged the retiring founder to make Bill Jr. the CEO. “After all,” Bill continues, “I’d literally learned the business visiting restaurants with my father as a young boy, and I’d worked part-time in different jobs at the company since I was 14. My father was worried that I was too young, but Marriott was still small at the time -- we had about $85 million in annual revenue-- and I think he figured he’d be around long enough to bail me out if I got into trouble.”

People skills continue to be of the utmost importance. “At Marriott, our culture is focused on people, because treating one another well is essential to creating an atmosphere in which everyone treats guests well, and that’s the most fundamental element of our business,” Bill says, noting also, “If you treat people well, they’ll want to stay. That’s especially true at Marriott, where we fill most jobs from inside, which gives people an awareness of the potential to move up.”

The leadership aspect of treating people well goes right back to the quality we are focusing on this month for Social Capital — CEOs getting out there with the employees and being accessible to them.

Bill has often counseled that the four most important words in business are "What do you think?" This comes from an experience he’d had in the Navy when he’d relied on his position in command hierarchy to get stewards to adopt his suggestions but was simply ignored. Relating, “I didn't ask the stewards in the Navy, ‘What do you think?’ I said, ‘Here, do this,’” he says, “I found out it doesn't work very well.” He encourages the “What do you think?” approach with his managers, and of course models it himself. In one instance, he recalls, “We were faced with a big decision and I'd pretty much made up my mind and everybody was on board. But one person in the back said he wasn't on board. And I said, ‘You weren't? You're not on board? You tell me why.’ And he told me, and he was right. So, we cancelled the project.”

The importance of listening to your people is one of the reasons he visits so many hotels every year to learn directly from the front line “what's going right, what's going wrong.”

Being out there in the midst of the business also enables him to see things that he might not otherwise find out about. For instance, during one visit to a property in New York, he found out they had the wrong guest chair in the room. “I told them, ‘Get rid of them; let's go buy some more guest chairs.’ They said, ‘Well, nobody's told us that in the last five years,’ and I said, ‘Well, here I am; let's do it.’"

Spending as much time as possible in his hotels enables Bill to gauge the challenges his employees face in the industry as well as how they feel about their employer and their work environment. With nearly 3,200 hotels in the Marriott family, it is not possible for him to visit all of them very frequently, but through his hands-on style of leadership he ensures his managers follow his leadership strategies and at the same time keep him informed through email or letters as to how things are moving on and what areas need improvement.

We honor Bill Marriott Jr. this month for the inspiring example he sets in getting out on the front line with his employees to listen, to value and to interact with them in a meaningful way because he believes they are important.

Or, in his own words, “I love this business. I think it’s one of the most rewarding industries in the world because it does so much to help people. We open a world of opportunity to people who wouldn’t otherwise have it. At Marriott, we have 50% of our general managers who came out of the hourly ranks, and that’s pretty impressive. A lot of our senior officers, too. If you look around this industry, there’s a lot of leadership that’s come out of our company.”

In fact, Bill shares that among his accomplishments, he is proudest of “opening the doors of opportunity to a lot of wonderful people who have been able to provide for their families. Whether they are a chef, a general manager or a senior executive, I like to think we’ve taught them something and helped them to excel.”