Juergen Bartels Hotel Operator Jumps To Westin Chain With Aggressive Plan For Growth

After turning Radisson hotels from a mid-priced stopover on Midwestern interstates into a worldwide chain, Juergen Bartels is being asked to go on another building binge.

The new owners of Westin Hotels and Resorts want Bartels to add 60 hotels over the next five years. That’s one per month.

“If you wanted somebody (to be a) caretaker and no growth, you wouldn’t look for me. I wouldn’t look for you either,” Bartels says with his native German accent.

As head of the Carlson Cos.’ hospitality business, which includes Radisson, Carlson’s Country Inns & Suites and T.G.I. Friday’s restaurants, Bartels built the business from 23 hotels 12 years ago to 350 today.

Carlson is still averaging a new hotel every five or six days.

Now, at age 54, having made his reputation at Carlson, Bartels is moving into a company that has lost some of its luster after displaying a “For Sale” sign for two years. Aoki Corp., owners of the 80-hotel Westin chain, finally slashed the price to close the sale to an investor group in May.

As he expands Westin, Bartels won’t have a luxury he enjoyed at Radisson - one of the world’s largest travel agencies as a sister company to help funnel guests to the thousands of new rooms.

“How would you like to go in without that and maintain that momentum,” said Bartels’ ex-boss, Carlson chief executive Curt Carlson. “He knows he’s taking a very big risk.”

Bartels acknowledged that Carlson-Wagonlit travel agencies were a help, but said he plans to woo agents and back Westin up with solid customer service to encourage repeat business.

Bartels has a broad, polite smile that must have served him well when he worked at front desks learning the basics of the business when he was still a teen-ager.

After working as president of the Holiday Inn hotels in Canada and then as president of Ramada Inns, Bartels went to Minneapolis in 1983 to take over Carlson’s relatively tiny hotel operation.

In the process of building Carlson’s business into one of the world’s biggest hotel chains, the two became closer than most employees get with their bosses.

“I grew to love the guy,” Carlson said, although he readily admits his feelings for underlings are closely tied to their performance.

Still, in a family-owned company where Bartels said the 80-year-old Carlson made him feel like a son, Bartels’ aspirations to the top job were blocked by closer family ties.

Carlson has named his daughter Marilyn Nelson Carlson a vice chairman of the parent company. She has emerged as his apparent successor.

“He’s one of the group I wanted to keep at this company to take over when I give up the day-to-day operations,” Carlson said in an interview days after Bartels quit. “I was surprised he would give that up.”

Confident that the expansion at Carlson was well on track, Bartels said he saw the Westin offer as an opportunity to build another chain and be the chairman and chief executive.

“It’s an opportunity I wouldn’t have had at Carlson,” Bartels said.

The Friday that Aoki sold the Westin chain to Bartels’ new bosses, J.B. - as his coworkers call him - told Carlson he was quitting immediately as head of the hospitality division.

“On Thursday we were together and he was very happy with everything,” Carlson said. “I was nonplused when he said he would leave right away.”

Bartels said he was contacted about the job five months earlier but didn’t say anything to Carlson. Until the deal was completed there wasn’t any job for him, he said.

Some on Wall Street had started to doubt the deal itself would ever come off, said Barry Sternlicht, president and chief executive of Starwood Capital Group L.P., which bought Westin along with Goldman, Sachs & Co. and Californiahotel company Edward Thomas Cos.

The buyers negotiated a $24 million discount from their original agreement of $561 million. An earlier deal to sell the chain for $708 million fell apart last year.

Aoki bought the chain in 1988 for $1.3 billion, then promptly sold the Westin Mauna Kea in Hawaii and the Plaza in New York for $735 million.

Bartels said the group intends to pursue acquisitions, management contracts with existing hotels and careful franchising with hotel operators that already meet Westin four- and five-star standards.