He started on the timeshare floor and worked his way to the corner office of the biggest name in vacation ownership. The pitch never changed - only the size of the room.
The product Tony Walker has sold for most of his working life is one you cannot hold in your hands. Not a room. Not a plane seat. A promise - a week in a place you have never been, redeemed years from now, sold to a stranger in the length of a single guided tour. It is one of the hardest sales in commerce, and in March 2026 the largest company that does it handed him the whole operation.
Walker was named Executive Vice President and Chief Sales and Marketing Officer at Marriott Vacations Worldwide, the roughly $5 billion vacation-ownership company behind Marriott, Sheraton, Westin, Ritz-Carlton and St. Regis branded resorts. He reports to President and Chief Operating Officer Mike Flaskey. On paper it is a corner-office appointment. In practice it is the top of a ladder Walker has been climbing, one rung at a time, for more than twenty years.
Most executives who run sales and marketing at this scale arrived through strategy decks and consulting rotations. Walker arrived through the sales floor - the kind where you close or you leave. He came up in vacation ownership when it was still called timeshare and still carried the reputation, working the tours and learning the objection-handling before he ever managed a P&L. That order matters. When he sets a strategy now, he is setting it for a job he has personally done.
His early stop was Fairfield Resorts in Las Vegas, where he was Vice President of Sales and Marketing. From there he moved to Starwood, becoming Regional Director of Florida and overseeing four sales galleries that represented more than $100 million in revenue. Each move traded a bigger title for a bigger number to be responsible for, and the numbers kept getting bigger.
The chapter that built his reputation was Diamond Resorts, where he became Executive Vice President and Chief Sales & Marketing Officer. The résumé line is a growth story with hard edges: revenue up roughly 50 percent, two acquisitions absorbed, eight new sales offices opened. At its peak the operation he led ran more than $1 billion in annual revenue and more than 2,000 team members, spread across 36 offices in 10 countries.
Growth like that in a business built on customer skepticism does not come from a single clever campaign. It comes from the unglamorous parts - training, recruitment, accountability, and the culture that holds them together. Ask Walker what he sells and the honest answer is two things at once: the vacation to the customer, and the discipline to the team. The Diamond run ended when the company was acquired by Hilton Grand Vacations in 2021, a clean punctuation mark on a decade of building.
The vacation is the fantasy. The operation behind it is anything but. He sells the first and runs the second.The Walker method
In October 2024 Walker did something that reads, at first, like a swerve. He joined Hornblower Group as Senior Vice President of Sales, later Chief Sales Officer - trading resorts for boats, leading global sales across water- and land-based experiences. It was a different product, but the same core problem: get people through the door, then make the visit worth it for everyone. He led a transformation of the company's enterprise sales organization.
"I'm thrilled to join the incredible sales team at Hornblower Group," he said at the time. "I look forward to working with teams across Hornblower as we explore innovative ways to expand on our current success." The detour turned out to be a bridge. His boss at Hornblower was chief executive Mike Flaskey.
When Flaskey took the President and COO seat at Marriott Vacations Worldwide, Walker followed into the Chief Sales and Marketing Officer role. Look at the timeline and the lesson is not about luck. In 2024 he reported to Mike Flaskey at a cruise company. In 2026 he reported to Mike Flaskey at the biggest name in vacation ownership. When a leader you have earned the trust of moves and wants you in the next chapter, that is a track record cashing in.
To understand the job Walker actually holds, learn one piece of jargon: Volume Per Guest, or VPG. It is how much a single visitor spends after walking a resort tour. Nearly everything he oversees pushes on two levers - tour flow, which is how many people you get through the door, and VPG, which is how much that visit is worth to both sides. Behind those two numbers sit the parts of the org chart that never make a brochure: sales training, recruitment, personal development, and product enhancements across every vacation-ownership brand the company owns.
His new boss framed the hire in the language of operations, not marketing. "Tony brings a disciplined, proven sales and marketing approach rooted in high performance and accountability, that is well-suited for our organization as we sharpen our focus on operational excellence and the customer journey," Flaskey said. Walker's own reaction was short and plain: "I am honored to join Marriott Vacations Worldwide at such an important time for the company and its associates."
Tony brings a disciplined, proven sales and marketing approach rooted in high performance and accountability.Mike Flaskey, President & COO, Marriott Vacations Worldwide
We tend to romanticize the overnight version of success - the founder, the rocket, the disruption. Walker's career is the other kind, the one that gets overlooked because it is slow. Handshake, quota, promotion, repeat, for twenty years, until the sum of small wins is a seat at a company that spans continents and brands. Reputation compounds slower than revenue, and it lasts longer. People kept betting on him, and then kept following him from one company to the next.
He works out of the Orlando area, near the theme-park corridor that is, fittingly, the capital of selling manufactured joy. The vacation he markets is instant and effortless in the ad. The way he got the job to market it was neither. That gap - between the frictionless dream on the page and the grind that delivers it - is the whole business, and Walker has spent his life on the hard side of it.