Westin Hotels & Resorts

Westin Hotels Resorts

Type	Subsidiary
Industry	Hotel
Founded	1930
Founder	Severt W. Thurston, Frank Dupar
Headquarters	Stamford, Connecticut U.S.A
Number of locations	192
Area served	Worldwide
Parent	Marriott International
Website	starwoodhotels.com/westin

Westin Hotels & Resorts is an American upscale hotel chain owned by Marriott International. As of 2013, Westin operated over 192 hotels in multiple countries across the globe.

In 1930, Severt W. Thurston and Frank Dupar of Seattle, Washington met unexpectedly during breakfast at a diner in Yakima, Washington. The competing hotel owners decided to form a management company to handle all their properties, and help deal with the crippling effects of the ongoing Great Depression. The men invited Peter and Adolph Schmidt, who operated five hotels in the Puget Sound area, to join them, and together they established Western Hotels. The chain consisted of 17 properties, 16 in Washington and one in Boise, Idaho.

Western expanded to Vancouver, British Columbia and Portland, Oregon in 1931, and by 1941 into Alaska and California. By the early 1950s, Western also had properties in Montana and Utah.

Early management developed each property individually. After more than two decades of rapid growth, many of its properties were merged into a single corporate structure in 1958, focusing on bringing the hotels together under a common chain identity.

Western Hotels managed a floating hotel aboard the ocean liner QSMV Dominion Monarch, during the Century 21 Exposition in Seattle in 1962. The chain also managed the restaurant atop the Space Needle, which they continued to manage until 1982.

The company was renamed Western International Hotels in 1963, to reflect its growth overseas. That same year, the company went public. In 1970, the chain was acquired by UAL Corporation. For its 50th anniversary in 1980, the company changed its name again to Westin Hotels & Resorts (a contraction of the words Western International).