Sudden Impact

So he focused on three priorities: First, he had to build better awareness of the company's Preferred Guest program, which lagged behind Hilton and Marriott in visibility despite its unprecedented policies of having no blackout dates and no limit on free rooms. Second, he had to find a way to measure the program's performance. And finally, he had to research customer segmentation for future promotions.

Then he set his group to work, testing various offers against the program's 13 million - member database. Some offers were designed to lure back customers whose use of the hotels had dropped off. Others tested various demographic and psychographic factors: Is this person a business traveler? Would she respond best to bonus points, a room upgrade, or a free night?

Some offers worked; some tanked. But for Berra, even the flops were illuminating. "This company doesn't view failure as a problem," he says. "The goal is to ask, Can you measure it? Can you understand why it did or didn't work? And if you failed, great. Use that to help you determine how to move forward. You can learn a lot from a dud."

With the efficiency and low cost of email targeting, Berra can now design campaigns for as few as 2,000 people, offering, for example, weekends in Chicago in January to people from Wisconsin and Indiana. (Don't laugh. That particular experiment generated a six-to-one return on investment.) "The nice thing about moving everything to electronic marketing is that you can queue up version A, version B, and version C and then watch how events unfold. Then you can push the button accordingly," Berra says. "What's important is the level of personalization and relevancy of content that you can deliver to your customers."

A year after his tumultuous job debut, Berra has stabilized his department enough to think about launching a few more initiatives. He's planning a frisky promotion that features boxer shorts for aficionados of the W line of hotels, a cobranded Zagat guide for Platinum members, and a companion ticket on major U.S. airlines for every two-night stay in a Sheraton through September. And as the U.S. market for frequent-traveler programs becomes saturated, he keeps Japan in his crosshairs.

Berra is an ambitious guy, so it's no surprise that his goal is to snag the ultimate Preferred Guest: "The president and first lady recently stayed in the St. Regis in Beijing," he says. "I'd like to make them VIP members."

The New Owners
Lydia Shire and Paul Licari, Locke-Ober
In Boston, there are certain things that you just don't do: Root for the Yankees at Fenway Park. Admit that you vote Republican. Wear jeans and sneakers to dinner at Locke-Ober.

One block from the Boston Common and a five-minute walk from the state house on Beacon Hill, Locke-Ober has been a bastion of privilege and Brahmin decorum since 1875. Tucked away at the end of an alley, the perennial watering hole for politicos was a favorite of John F. Kennedy, who huddled in the private rooms upstairs, mapping his campaign for president with Arthur Schlesinger and John Kenneth Galbraith. Both Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt dined there, and Enrico Caruso (a notoriously stingy tipper) was a fan of the sweetbreads Eugénie.

But by 1999, the restaurant had fallen on hard times. Lydia Shire, proprietor of two trendsetting restaurants (both of which are now closed), was one of the first of the city's many interested chefs to make an offer when the business was put up for sale. Knowing that the owner, David Ray, was concerned about preserving the restaurant's heritage, she played to his New England chauvinism: "I told him, 'You can sell it to anybody, but don't sell it to a carpetbagger. And why not sell it to me? Who better than an Irish broad from Boston?' "

It took Ray two years to sort through various offers, but in late July 2001, he agreed to a 20-year lease in a deal constructed by Shire and her business partner, Paul Licari. Licari, who has a long history in the restaurant trade, knew what they were in for. "The place had become a breeding ground for bad things," he says. "It was beaten, tired, hurt. As bad as anything I've witnessed."

Historically, summers at Locke-Ober are slow. But the fall is always busy, and the holidays are downright frenzied. Shire and Licari were determined to capture that business, even if it gave them only two and a half months to prepare for opening. Says Shire: "We got the permit and flew."

Shire hired a new kitchen staff, and she worked to update the recipes on the menu. Licari supervised the waitstaff and the remodeling, overhauling the kitchen and renovating the lounge by regilding the walls, laying a new floor, and rewiring light fixtures. While they were eager to infuse new life into Locke-Ober, they knew that to change it too much would be to destroy it. "We came into an environment that dictated many things to us creatively: the name, the dress code, the price point, the menu, the physical assets, even some of the employees," Licari says.