A Region Running in Two Gears
Neal Jones took over as Marriott International’s EMEA president in March, just as the Iran war broke out. One hundred days in, he is running a region pulling in opposite directions.
“It’s quite a unique situation that frankly is probably new to everybody,” Jones told Skift in his first media interview since taking the job. “We’re actually operating two very fundamentally different phases of business within the same operating region.”
Marriott has around 1,400 hotels across the region. About 175 of them sit in the Middle East — “just over 20% of our EMEA fee business,” Jones said. The remaining 80% is doing the heavy lifting while he waits for the Gulf to recover.
“Europe and Africa, we’re on a kind of growth trajectory, but at the same time, the Middle East … is really in recovery mode,” he said.
“Learning about how we actually manage that internally, so that we can support that recovery in the Middle East, while
