Sheraton Hotels

Sheraton Hotels and Resorts

Type	Hotel
Industry	Hospitality, hotels, tourism
Founded	1937 in Springfield, Massachusetts, U.S.
Founder	Ernest Henderson Robert Moore
Number of locations	400+ (Worldwide)
Products	Temporary residence
Number of employees	145,000
Parent	Marriott International
Website	sheraton.com

Sheraton Hotels and Resorts is a chain of luxury hotels owned by Marriott International.

The origins of the brand date back to 1933, when Harvard classmates Ernest Henderson and Robert Moore purchased the Continental Hotel in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1937 they purchased the Standard Investing Company and made it the company through which they ran their hotels. Their second hotel, and the first as part of the new company, was the Stonehaven Hotel in Springfield, Massachusetts, a converted apartment building they purchased in 1937. The chain got its name from a third hotel the pair acquired in Boston, which already had a large lighted sign on the roof saying "Sheraton Hotel" that was too expensive to change. Instead, Henderson and Moore decided to call all their hotels by that name.

Henderson and Moore purchased Boston's famed Copley Plaza Hotel in 1941, continuing with their rapid expansion opening properties along the entire East Coast. In 1945, Sheraton was the first hotel chain to be listed on the .

In 1949 Sheraton expanded internationally with the purchase of two Canadian hotel chains. In 1956, Sheraton purchased the Eppley Hotel Company, which was then the largest privately held hotel business in the United States, for $30 million. Three years later, in 1959 it purchased the four hotels owned by the Matson Lines in Honolulu, Hawaii, its first hotels outside North America. In 1955, Sheraton began to build large highway hotels (100-300 rooms); in 1962 a franchise division was created to promote Sheraton Motor Inns. These provided free parking and competed with roadside motels.

The 1960s saw the first Sheraton hotels outside the US and Canada with the opening of the Tel Aviv-Sheraton in Israel in February 1961 and the Macuto-Sheraton outside Caracas, Venezuela, in 1963. By 1965, the 100th Sheraton property, the Sheraton-Boston Hotel, had opened its doors. The multinational conglomerate ITT purchased the chain in 1968, after which it was known as ITT Sheraton. The chain deployed its automated Reservatron system and, in late 1969, a US national toll-free number displaced two hundred local Sheraton reservation numbers.