From a business perspective, it makes perfect sense, but moralistically, it does not.
It is very disappointing that even I, as an Asian individual living in Canada, am disincentivized from expressing even my own opinion on China and HK/Taiwan, etc. due to the perceived threat of "consequences" from a government whose reach I cannot easily quantify.
Marriot do have a spotty history on such issues, but I think we should commend them when they attempt to do the right thing. Yes this shouldn't have happened in the first place, but given that it did they do seem to be doing their best to make it right.
I'm not going to post this reply to every single other comment ragging on 'Marriot' here, which is all but one top level comment, but come on people. Read the article. Oh, and now that top level comment that was actually informed and provided useful context is getting downvoted into oblivion. We can do better than this.
It usually doesn't matter, but on policy questions there can sometimes be some friction between owner preferences & Marriott corporate preferences.
Usually this is over things like "Your food and service isn't up to Marriott quality, because you're under investing." But I imagine politics is also a sensitive point too. Regardless, Marriott corporate usually wins, as a hotel-without-the-Marriott-name prints less money.
Edit: Although in this instance, from the scarce details, it sounds like it was divergence from corporate policy by local management. Which, if you're putting management teams in ~7,900 properties, is probably a thing that happens.
Basic summary: https://marketrealist.com/2014/10/why-marriotts-hotels-have-...
Marriott Intl page for franchisees: https://hotel-development.marriott.com/
According to a recent SEC filing, they own 20 properties internationally, lease another ~40. They manage 2,149, and franchise 5,493.
https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/0001048286/0...
Also note that their apology doesn’t explicitly condemn the hotel’s behavior, it just says that they’re providing training. Definitely riding the fence.
Maybe it's due to my bad English, but I'm not able to find any sign of actual "overrule" of this decision. Is the WUC was finally accepted at this Hotel?
It's easy to give into a pessimistic spiral; I always wanted these kinds of issues to become well-known, but it seems like the response is often some kind of "yeah, figures.", foregoing the conclusion.
In a similar, but lesser vein; John Cena's apology video didn't once mention what he was apologizing for, and still got lots of flak from mainland Chinese because of that. It was plain to everyone involved what the video was aimed to do, but it's the kind of fence-walking that we miss.
Where are you seeing this?
> The Marriott spokesperson clarified in a statement to Axios that hosting the conference would not have violated any "political neutrality" policy, and said the reference to "corporate management" in the email referred to "hotel-level management."
> "We are working with the hotel team to provide additional training and education on our longstanding practices of inclusion," she said.
And that is our fault, to a great extent.
By "we", here I mean citizens of western countries that put up with this bullshit. When one of "our" companies engages in this shameful authoritarian appeasement we should boycott them to oblivion. If we fail to do so, we are enabling this behavior.
There's not much that we can do about human rights abuses in other countries. But there's a lot that we can do in our own countries to local companies that participate or validate the abusers. In that particular case, it would be feasible for Austrian people to stop all Marriott operations on the whole country, with a targeted human-rights campaign.
What's the difference between what you're promoting and the knee-jerk cancel culture that's as bad as what it punishes? I like to think we can influence and change behaviours without "boycotting companies into oblivion", even if that was realistic or likely. There's a large distance between your aggressive post on the internet and an entire country of people coordinating a campaign against specific business.
1. People don't have enough motivation, knowledge, and free time to find and keep track of which companies behave ethically. Also, people are generally selfish and will buy from unethical companies if it saves them money or time. (I did this yesterday.)
2. Liars deceive large groups of people and escape punishment or cause wrong punishment of a competitor.
In a modern society, we need people with specialized skills to do the work of holding companies accountable. We should train them, pay them, and hold them accountable for how they do their jobs. USA has a law forbidding US people from paying bribes to anyone anywhere in the world. The FBI enforces this law.
How about adding a law forbidding US people from discriminating in business based on political or religious affiliation? I think we don't have this because a lot of US people wish to run their businesses with bigotry. See the gay wedding cake controversy [0].
Such laws would be terrific. Example: Gofundme will not be permitted to ban Kyle Rittenhouse's fundraising.
The number of folks on the right being discriminated against outnumber the folks on the left by several orders of magnitude.
Nike and Apple do have some leverage that the government can work with. However, American imports tend to be intermediary goods, so doing so would mutually damage both sides. We barely have enough on the table to negotiate trade, so no politician is going to enter a war of attrition for humanitarian reasons, especially if it's one that they have been preparing for, and we have not.
I don't sense our news-media wants to fight this fight.