Sheraton Hotels and Resorts

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Sheraton Hotels and Resorts got its name by accident. When Harvard classmates Ernest Henderson and Robert Moore picked up their third hotel, in Boston in 1939, the building already had a large lighted sign on the roof reading "Hotel Sheraton." Changing it was too expensive, so the pair did something simpler: they named every hotel they owned after that sign. The name probably derived from furniture designer Thomas Sheraton, but the chain's founders chose it for reasons that had nothing to do with design or heritage. They chose it because it was cheaper than new signage.

  That pragmatic instinct runs through the whole Sheraton story. Two men who met at Harvard built one of the world's largest hotel empires not by dreaming up a grand vision, but by acquiring existing properties, cutting deals, and moving fast. By 1947, their company was the first hotel chain listed on the New York Stock Exchange. By 1958, it had computerized its reservations before any other hotel chain on earth. By the time it passed through the hands of ITT and then Starwood and then Marriott International, the chain operated hundreds of properties on every inhabited continent.

  How did a converted apartment building in Springfield, Massachusetts, turn into a global brand with more than 150,000 rooms? And what happens to a brand that carries both the prestige of its early innovations and the weight of its aging properties?

• 2. Cambridge to New York Stock Exchange

  ›

  In 1933, Ernest Henderson and Robert Moore paid for their first property, the Continental Hotel in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The two Harvard classmates had no particular background in hospitality. What they had was a willingness to acquire and reorganize.

  By 1937, they had built a corporate structure to hold their growing portfolio. They merged the Standard Investing Corporation with the International Equities Corporation to form the Standard Equities Corporation, the vehicle through which they would manage their hotels. That same year they bought the Stonehaven Hotel in Springfield, Massachusetts, a converted apartment building. Sheraton officially counts its founding from 1937 and treats the Stonehaven as its first hotel under the new company.

  The Boston sign came two years later, and with it the name that would outlast both founders. In 1941, the pair acquired Boston's Copley Plaza Hotel and kept pushing south and north along the East Coast, from Maine to Florida, buying up existing properties rather than building new ones.

  The Standard Equities Corporation merged again in 1946, this time with the United States Realty and Improvement Corporation. The resulting entity was the Sheraton Corporation of America, and the very next year it became the first hotel chain to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange. A business that had started with a single hotel in Cambridge had, in little more than a decade, entered the public markets.

• 3. Deals, Motels, and Computers

  ›

  In 1949, Henderson and Moore crossed the border for the first time, buying the Ford Hotels chain and its three properties in Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal. They quickly resold the Toronto and Ottawa hotels to fund a larger Canadian push, paying $4.8 million in 1950 to acquire Cardy Hotels, a six-property chain spread across Ontario and Quebec.

  Back in the United States, 1956 brought Sheraton's biggest single acquisition to that point. The chain paid $30 million for the Eppley Hotel Company, then the largest privately held hotel business in the country, with 22 properties across six Midwestern states. Sheraton kept ten of the largest and immediately sold the other twelve. That same year, Sheraton moved into the motel business for the first time, purchasing two suburban properties outside Syracuse, New York.

  Until 1957, the chain had grown almost entirely through acquisition. That year it opened its first newly built hotel, the Philadelphia Sheraton Hotel, marking a shift in strategy. The following year brought something more lasting: Sheraton introduced Reservatron, the hotel industry's first automatic electronic reservations system, making Sheraton the first chain to centralize and computerize its bookings. In 1967, the chain upgraded to Reservatron II, a system built for personalized reservations.

  In late 1969, under new ownership, Sheraton went further. The chain introduced the hotel industry's first nationwide toll-free number, collapsing two hundred local reservation lines into a single contact point. The radio jingle for that number, "Eight-Oh-Oh, Three-Two-Five, Three-Five Three-Five," ran throughout the decade and into the eighties, and persisted even beyond that.

• 4. Going Global

  ›

  In 1959, Sheraton acquired its first properties outside North America: four hotels on Waikiki Beach in Honolulu owned by the Matson Lines, including the Moana Hotel, the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, the SurfRider Hotel, and the Princess Kaiulani Hotel. Hawaii was not yet a state when negotiations began, and the purchase put Sheraton on the Pacific in one transaction.

  The true international expansion followed quickly. March 1961 saw the opening of the Sheraton-Tel Aviv Hotel in Israel. Two Caribbean properties opened in 1962: the Sheraton-Kingston Hotel in Jamaica and the Sheraton British Colonial in Nassau, Bahamas. In April 1951, the Park Sheraton Hotel in New York City had hosted the NBA draft, the second ever held under the NBA name. By the mid-1960s, the chain was opening in South America, with the Macuto-Sheraton Hotel opening outside Caracas, Venezuela in 1963.

  The 100th Sheraton property, the Sheraton-Boston Hotel, opened in 1965. The following year, the chain entered Kuwait, the first Sheraton in an Arab country. Then 1967 brought three firsts in a single year: the Sheraton-Philippines Hotel in Manila was the chain's first property in Asia; the Sheraton-Du Cap Hotel on the island of Corsica became its first in Europe; and two Sheraton Motor Hotels in Melbourne and Sydney marked its entry into Australia.

  In 1970, Sheraton opened its first hotel in North Africa, the Cairo-Sheraton Hotel and Casino. In 1971, Continental Europe followed, with the Sheraton Stockholm Hotel and the Sheraton-Copenhagen Hotel opening that year. The Sheraton-Mont Febe Palace in Yaounde, Cameroon, opened in 1972 as the chain's first property in Sub-Saharan Africa.

• 5. ITT Takes the Wheel

  ›

  In 1968, the multinational conglomerate ITT Corporation purchased Sheraton and promptly sold eighteen of its older properties. Under ITT, the chain shifted away from direct ownership toward franchising and management contracts, a model that allowed faster growth with less capital tied up in real estate.

  By 1970, Sheraton had introduced the Towers concept: a luxury "hotel-within-a-hotel" designed for business travelers, embedded within the chain's largest locations. The first Sheraton Towers opened inside the Sheraton-Boston Hotel. In 1985, Sheraton became the first western chain to operate a hotel carrying an international company's name inside China, when it took over management of the financially troubled Great Wall Hotel in Beijing. The two-year-old Chinese-American joint venture became the Great Wall Sheraton.

  By 1987, a New York Times description captured the brand's standing at the time: "50 years old, the world's largest hotel chain, and consumer-driven." On the 24th of October 1989, the chain was officially rebranded as ITT Sheraton.

  In January 1992, ITT Sheraton reorganized its upper tier, designating 28 premier hotels and 33 Sheraton Towers properties as the ITT Sheraton Luxury Collection. The flagship of that new division was The St Regis in New York City. The company was headquartered at 60 State Street in Boston from 1977 to 1997.

  In 1994, ITT Sheraton purchased a controlling interest in CIGA, the Compagnia Italiana Grandi Alberghi, an Italian luxury chain that had over-expanded across Europe into a recession and been seized from its previous owner, the Aga Khan, by creditors. Most of the CIGA hotels entered the Luxury Collection, with a few placed under the Sheraton flag. In April 1995, ITT Sheraton launched Four Points by Sheraton as a mid-range brand to replace the old Sheraton Inns designation.

• 6. Starwood, Marriott, and What Remains

  ›

  In 1998, Starwood Hotels acquired ITT Sheraton for $13.3 billion, beating out a competing bid from Hilton. Under Starwood, the chain began renovating properties and growing its footprint. Starwood also repositioned The Luxury Collection as a fully separate brand, even though it still contained hotels bearing the Sheraton name. Over time, most of those properties were renamed. As of 2024, only three remain in The Luxury Collection under the Sheraton name: Sheraton Addis in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; Sheraton Grande Sukhumvit in Bangkok, Thailand; and Sheraton Kuwait in Kuwait City, Kuwait.

  Also in 1998, Sheraton partnered with Germany's Arabella Hospitality Group to create ArabellaSheraton, a joint venture that rebranded 14 Arabella Hotels across Germany, Switzerland and Spain. In 1999, Sheraton completed its CIGA ownership by buying the outstanding shares.

  In 2015, Starwood introduced the Sheraton Grand designation for higher-end Sheraton properties in urban or resort locations. The following year, Marriott International purchased Starwood, once again creating the world's largest hotel and resort company. The Sheraton brand continued to carry weight in Asia, while aging properties in the United States presented ongoing challenges.

  In 2023, Marriott announced Four Points Express by Sheraton, a spinoff targeting the mid-range market in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Its first property opened in Nilüfer, Bursa, Turkey. In 2024, the brand was renamed Four Points Flex by Sheraton. As of 2024, Sheraton operates 431 properties with 150,640 rooms worldwide, with North America still accounting for 166 properties, while the Asia-Pacific region has grown to 155 properties, reflecting a geographic shift that has been building across the past decade.