Sheraton Hotels’ new concepts will make you work at the hotel lobby itself

I’ve spent about one third my life in hotel rooms for the past few years, and while they all look the same, there are nuanced differences in each and every brand I’ve stayed at. For instance, at a Four Points, I expect to get a room, but at a St. Regis, I expect to get a room with a butler, and at a Doubletree by Hilton, I always expect to receive a cookie at check-in. However, one of the most well-known brands in the business, Sheraton, somehow, started to become a generic name not to be identified with anything but their brown carpets. With 450 hotels around the globe, that is a lot of brown carpets.

A few years ago, however, about the time of the merger of their parent company Starwood, with Marriott International in 2016, there was a new plan coming up to rejuvenate the brand. Sheraton intended to move away from their staid looking hotel and lobbies, to catch all the latest trends and adopt to the newest way of working and travel.

So, they zeroed down on the millennial business traveller, and formed a new look and feel for the hotel, one, where the hotel would be at the centre of the community it exists with. First steps, a new logo was unveiled, with arrows pointing inwards to show the intent I just wrote about.

But how do they do this in reality? Business has been conducted in the hotel lobbies and lounges for a long time, deals have been made and so on. And Marriott concluded that the lobby was the place to reinvent to make the Sheraton brand connect with the future. The new Sheraton concept takes a lot of inspiration from co-working and cafeterias, as it wants to appeal to the millennial workforce to live and work with them.