Corporate Retreats and Luxury Business Travel

Starwood Hotels and Resorts want to change the mundaneness of the hotel into an experience on it's own.
They own many hotels like Sheridan and so on.
My question is why did it take them so long?
The level of customer service in Europe has been doing this forever! This should be the norm.
I mean you have so much competition out there--you almost need to be different to stand out from the rest. Here are some of the value-added services:

• A revamped web offering, both for bookings and for learning more about Sheraton properties and the personal anecdotes of travellers who have stayed there
• Confirmation or pre-arrival emails
• On arrival, a personal greeting from a member of management
• A postage paid postcard to send to friends and relatives
• The gradual roll-out of the Yahoo link at Sheraton, a dedicated area, usually in the lobby, with internet access and a virtual printing service for printing airline boarding passes, newspapers, magazines, CNN television.