Marriott International Inc.'s CEO acknowledged that many market participants are wondering if the hotelier will survive the coronavirus pandemic, but said the company is taking dramatic steps to conserve cash until business recovers.

The virus is "fast becoming the most significant event to ever impact our business," including the global financial crisis and the year after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, President and CEO Arne Sorenson said in a special conference call to discuss the company's response. Sorenson said he has been to the White House and in contact with congressional leaders in recent days to lobby for near-term assistance.

In particular, he said, he and other industry figures are focused on requesting emergency assistance for employees; initiatives to preserve business liquidity that would support the owners of franchised and managed hospitality properties; and tax relief to ease near-term cash flow challenges. The company is negotiating with the Italian government and labor unions in that country to obtain financial aid for company associates from a national security fund.

Amid broader uncertainty, "the markets are understandably looking for assurance that we will survive," Sorenson said. "Why do I say this? Because there is no other rational explanation for the selloff in our stock, even if you assume this crisis lasts many quarters."

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The company believes the crisis will "very likely" be "well behind us" sometime in 2020, or early in 2021 at the latest, he added.

"That leaves only one question: Will we survive that long?" Sorenson said. "I am confident the answer to that is yes. Our business model is sound, the future prospects for travel are sound. Through management of our costs and balance sheet, as to which we are taking very aggressive actions, we will work our way through this."

CFO Leeny Oberg detailed the company's expectations for fees that are not directly tied to hotel bookings, such as credit card branding fees, which totaled $410 million in 2019. Sorenson, meanwhile, said much of the company's normal spending will be "recalibrated."

"We spend a billion dollars or so on marketing annually," he said. "Why are we going to market, in the midst of fear, when people are social distancing and not traveling?"

Asked to estimate how many of the company's U.S. hotels will close during the outbreak, Sorenson said: "I don't think it will be rare. I think we'll have many that close. ... We know that there are hundreds of hotels that are either closing or looking at closing."

Even if properties do close, Oberg said, the company would expect to continue charging hotel owners for the "very low" amount of costs required to keep running its system.

The company is not providing guidance on its expectations for revenue per available room.

"A full-year minus-50% RevPAR number is obviously a stunningly negative number," Sorenson said, adding that based on relatively strong performance before effects of the virus were widespread, first-quarter performance "is not going to be anywhere near that bad."

"Q2 could be worse than that, without a doubt," he said. "In fact, we would guess it's going to be worse than that. Q3 and Q4, we're going to have to watch and see where it goes."

Sorenson said anxiety among analysts, and at the company, appears to be focused on whether Marriott can right-size its business fast enough to deal with the reduced revenue it is confronting.

"We've moved very forcefully on that, in a way that is heart-wrenching to many of us, and breathtaking in lots of respects," he said. "In the many hours of tossing and turning at night these days, I've worried about that, but I'm also worried that we are cutting so deeply that the rebuilding process will be more challenging than we anticipated, and maybe to some extent that we might regret having moved as aggressively that we've moved."

He added: "I suppose on one level, we hope that's the problem we confront, because it would imply that we're coming back sooner and stronger than our worst-case scenarios."