Northstar

www.travelweekly-asia.com | 3 VOICES My grandmother always had a passion for knowing what was going on in the world but unfortunately, given her lack of mobility and circumstance, she never had the opportunity to actually see it for herself. She never found the opportunity to travel. However, in her final few years, she declared her desire to start a fridge magnet collection. She asked that if and whenever we went on holiday, we could buy her a simple magnetic token for her to display proudly on her fridge. A memento of where we had been and what we had seen. It felt almost as if her dreams of travel were realised vicariously through our eyes. So, no matter where we went, whether it was a museum, monument or even nowhere particularly remarkable, we'd keep our eyes peeled for a magnet that we could bring to her on our next visit. We'd trawl every gift shop and crowd around the single rack of magnets that could twirl at the base, spinning it to take a glance at every display without any regard for any other customer who might be browsing on the other side! Of course, given my family's dark sense of humour, we'd look for magnets that had a particular edge… perhaps a witty joke or one that could do something unique like play a tune (our Edinburgh magnet was a miniature bagpipe that could wheeze at the press of a button). Within a year, the off-white fridge door had transformed into a world atlas of sorts. I remember stepping into her kitchen and lightly running my hand over its ridged surface, feeling every bump and texture on my palm. We had been to so many places and this was our way of bringing a little chunk We may fancy ourselves as the new age of globetrotters, planning on living on absolutely every continent and be excited about the idea of never truly having one set address but I am not convinced that we will never stray too far from where we feel at home. At the end of the day, we spring back and we revisit of it back to her, so she could feel a part of it. We stopped collecting fridge magnets when my grandmother passed away. As we went through her material possessions, sorting through what to keep and what to give away or discard, there was an unspoken understanding that the fridge magnets were absolutely sacred. They now cling proudly to our own fridge door at home but they do not serve as a reminder of our family holidays. Instead they remind me of how no matter where we were in the world, we took her with us. We made her a part of every experience through the simple act of finding a token that could help her envision what lay beyond her small but homely Cornish countryside town. So it forced me to acknowledge the question – when we buy souvenirs, who are they really for? Sometimes I wonder how the souvenirs we purchase are actually supposed to remind us of our experiences in a particular place. Side- stepping the fact that many of them are tacky, mass- produced tat adorned with the inescapable tag, 'Made in China', I defend the fact that they still hold purpose. Not so much out of the need to buy a material possession that can serve as a physical reminder of our own holiday but because of the potential it has to mean something so much greater to someone else. The same way we used to send postcards with the minimalist message "Thinking of you" or "Wish you were here" was enough to remind someone across the globe that they were never too far from one's thoughts, bringing a gift (no matter how kitsch) achieved the same. THE MILLENNIAL TRAVELLER MAGNETIC RESONANCE Marissa Trew is an MA Psychology graduate from the University of Edinburgh, who is pursuing her passions for food and health through a career in travel and lifestyle journalism. Her love of exploration stems from summers spent marching on her stomach across Europe, Asia and North America, with every destination having a profound influence in shaping her outlook and interests in life. J.W. Marriott, Jr. is chairman and chief executive officer of Marriott International, Inc., one of the world's largest lodging companies. His leadership spans more than 50 years, and he has taken Marriott from a family restaurant business to a global lodging company with nearly 4,000 properties in more than 70 countries and territories. DON'T RELY ON DATA ALONE, TRUST OUR GUT. BLOG: MARRIOTT ON THE MOVE Anyone in business today is swamped with data, this chart shows you one thing while another can totally contradict it! When I stepped down as President and CEO, I said the hotel business was getting too complicated, to which my long-time assistant Phyllis said, 'It's your own fault, you made it that way.' I guess she's partially right. I've always hired people smarter than me, especially when it came to finance. Sure, they have to know numbers, but most importantly they have to translate what those numbers mean. In our Revenue Management department, we hired a rocket scientist. Boy, can he explain things – room occupancies, RevPars, rates, luxury brand trends. I worry, though. Even with our very smart team, I worry that we are sometimes getting too bogged down in the numbers to see the forest. We receive daily results showing room occupancy. We know where our customers click to book a room with us. Instant data. These metrics lead to strategic analytics. You throw all this in a blender and … I scratch my head. Sure, numbers help, but leadership is about making the call and relying on something far more valuable – your gut. Data analysts haven't found a formula for that. Trusting your gut comes from experience. I've been in the business for 60 years, and I've had every kind of experience you can imagine. We've weathered major stock market downturns, the Great Recession and 9/11. As a result, the gut trust becomes stronger the more experience you have. At the same time, you really have to listen to everybody that's on your team as to what they think, what their problems are, what their concerns are. Here's an example from my time at the company: We had an opportunity to invest in another business that was not our core business. I had people on one side saying we should do it because we can make a lot of money. On the other side, we had people saying don't do it, let's stay with and focus on the core lodging business. Our lodging business is one that we finally arrived at after being in 15 or 20 different kinds of businesses in the last 40 years. At our most diverse, there was no way we could keep track of all those businesses. Nobody understood why we were in it all. So, we got out of it. Now, we're focused on lodging, and I feel good that we can stay focused on one business and be the world's favourite travel company. So when I listened to the arguments, my experienced gut told me that I didn't want to invest in another business. We decided against it. Do you trust your instincts? When and when have you not? our collection of memories in the comforts of a place where we feel no compulsion to leave. And, to state the obvious, that place will always be 'where the heart is'. For me, that place is not the apartment I live in now but in my grandmother's kitchen, running my hand over our 'souvenirs'.

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