Todd Hickey, General Manager, The Sawgrass Marriott Golf Resort & Spa

Todd Hickey, general manager of the Sawgrass Marriott Golf Resort & Spa, sits down with Invest: to discuss the state of business and leisure travel, how hospitality has evolved over the years, goals for the years ahead and strategies to attract guests from the United States and around the world.

What strategies are employed to attract domestic and international guests?

From the group and convention side of the business, this hotel sits in a larger bucket of hotels called the Convention Resort Network within Marriott. We have a large collection of hotels from mostly across the United States, but we also have many in Canada. We work together to promote business from conventions within that network of hotels. This provides a competitive advantage to us over other hotel brands or companies. We share best practices within this group, as well as co-marketing. This group is responsible for about 80% of our convention and group business. General managers and sales leaders come together to meet twice each year at a conference to come up with new strategies to attract new customers, entertain existing customers and customize experiences. Many of our customers repeat and use similar hotels of size, so we may have a group booking here in 2025 that will go to a similarly sized hotel at 514 rooms on the West Coast. We find that it is easier to move those groups around within our network. 

These days, group business is definitely back. A few years ago, it was all leisure business when the world stopped traveling, but business has been really strong on the group side for our entire company lately. We like to say we are connecting people through the power of travel. 

What are the key ingredients to maintaining your reputation and brand? 

There is a lot to offer here. We have to make sure we are catering to everyone, so we have multiple restaurants across the property, including a members-and-guests-only restaurant at Cabana Beach Club. There is also a beautiful pool with access to the beach. Even though we are not beachfront, being able to offer this to our group and leisure guests is an important enrichment factor. At the resort we have 63,000 square feet of meeting space that is laid out well inside the building. For the most part, it is all on one level. We create flexibility in the amount of rooms we have and their sizes. Our audio and visual partner, Encore®, provides a world-class AV experience. We also have smooth check-ins, great food and beverage, and great content. Sawgrass sits on over 60 acres of beautiful oak-lined land as well. From a networking standpoint, we have pools and outdoor experiences our customers can enjoy at the resort while being close to Sawgrass Village. Additionally, our company culture is strong. We are 97 years old and have always leaned on our core values and associates. 

What changes have you seen in hospitality over the course of your career? 

Some technologies have certainly helped us to do our jobs better. I remember when I first started, we had to pencil groups’ room assignments in a large book. The technology we have now is much more web-based, and things are in more than one spot in our systems. This allows our teams to easily build a contract, create a group template, prepare events and food orders and more. The company is working on building a digital transformation of our reservation system for customers’ check-in. It will make this process easier to manage. 

Our members use our Marriott Bonvoy app to safely check into your hotel room, chat with an agent at your hotel, search for reservations, check and redeem points, look for business and vacation opportunities, and more. 

Where do you see Sawgrass going in the next five years? 

We are actually getting ready to undertake some renovations at our main hotel building. There are 351 rooms in the main tower, which will undergo renovation in the back half of 2025. We are in the planning phases of this right now and creating what these rooms will look like in the future. Additionally, we are working on renovations and refreshes to the restaurants and our lobby. Improvements to fixtures and equipment will begin this fall. 

We have close to 9,000 hotels with 30 different brands around the world. This is an opportunity for us to continue to drive group business and utilize our meetings, experiences and people to build for the future. The PGA TOUR’s headquarters are here, and we continue to partner with them, not only during THE PLAYERS Championship, but with the golf courses and that facility brings a lot of business and leisure tourism to the market.

We are currently booking into 2030 for corporate and association groups, we are looking forward to the future. We are lucky to have enough flexible space where we can accommodate different size groups, be it corporate and associations or smaller groups like sporting events, weddings, social events and the likes.