Sandals Resorts Executive Chairman: The Caribbean is ‘our playground’

Sandals Resorts Executive Chairman Adam Stewart says that the Caribbean is their ‘playground’ which allows them to stay ahead of competitors in the hospitality sector.

Video transcript

ANDY SERWER: How do you compete, though, against the big boys? Those giant names, and there's a lot of them. I mean, there's European names. There's American names. You're competing against some public companies, well-financed companies.

ADAM STEWART: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think the word would be "agility." So the fact that we know our space, our playground is the four corners of the Caribbean. Our mission is to share the best of the four corners of the Caribbean with the world. And our agility, our team, when you look at the people around this organization, I mean, to have worked for this company for 20 years, you're still kind of a rookie coming into it.

So the baseline of the team, the culture, and the business, the "can do" attitude to get things done, all centered around consumer experiences, is really our thing. We have-- uniquely, we own every one of our resorts, which is very abnormal in the hospitality business. It allows us to invest faster. It allows us to have a more intimate relationship with our customer base. That customer base today represents about 50% of our base of our business, meaning our repeat guest ratio is about 50%.

As a matter of fact, just before I came in here to meet with you, I was chatting to some of what we call our diamond team members. These are customers, these particular customers have over 500 paid nights staying in our resorts. So for us, we fascinate and we revel in everything to do with customer experience. And I think it keeps the big boys on their toes.

ANDY SERWER: Right, have you thought about expanding outside the Caribbean, or are you going to keep your footprint here in this part of the world?

ADAM STEWART: There is no question that the brand is big enough. We have an 84% brand recognition in North America unprecedented in this space of all-inclusive. The truth is that never say never, but for the foreseeable future, we have so much going on in the Caribbean. There's still more to conquer in the Caribbean.

We have three new resorts in Jamaica, where we are today, under construction. We just opened a resort called Sandals Royal Curacao in the Dutch Caribbean Island of Curacao. Fascinating country, incredible resort. We are under construction in Turks and Caicos. We are under construction in St. Vincent and the Grenadines. And that list is growing kind of by the day.

So we feel that the Caribbean is a really magical place. My father used to always say that the almighty spent a little bit more time on the Caribbean when he was creating the world. And we fundamentally believe that.