We love it. Sometimes hotel marketing can get stale. So when Marriott built its customer app, it looked to non-hotels like theme parks for inspiration like theme parks.
What they found: Customers want apps to make their experiences hassle-free — and then get out of their way. They arrive at the hotel, go straight to their room, and open the door with their smartphone. The same goes for checkout.
Easy in, easy out. How could they market the app without being intrusive? Dreams about luxury Hawaiian holidays are motivating, particularly for travelers who spend a meaningful part of their lives on the road Regis, and W Hotels create value beyond room-night revenue.
These aspirational destinations drive traffic to Marriott's premium, mid-tier, and casual brands, as customers stockpile points for those dreamy tropical vacations.
It's no surprise, then, that between affluent core customers and point-redeeming vacationers, the company's luxury collections enjoy enviable occupancy rates.
Climbing occupancy opens additional opportunities for on-property fee revenue. Like loyalty and luxury, our booking engines are also a significant competitive advantage. Guests can book our hotels directly through our websites, apps, call centers, [or] group sales offices, or on property. Increasingly, Marriott is seeking to capture bookings directly instead of relying on online travel agencies OTAs. As the company has upgraded its booking technology and implemented an advanced revenue yield management system, it's more willing to price-match rates offered on third-party sites -- provided customers book through its loyalty program.
According to Sorenson, two-thirds of transient business in was booked via the company's direct channels listed above. Marriott says it's focused on direct digital bookings for loyalty members on high-occupancy nights. This is a yield strategy that should appeal to shareholders: During high-occupancy windows, the company should seek to book travelers directly, thus maximizing revenue. It makes little sense to incentivize third-party reservations at promotional rates during periods when substantial demand already exists.
Rather, customers enrolled in the company's loyalty program are being trained to expect reasonable discounts when reserving rooms through Marriott's branded apps. And of course, the garnering of points provides another incentive -- typically, bookings through OTAs generate no loyalty points for customers. Sorenson cited a somewhat surprising metric which speaks to Marriott's success in securing room nights through proprietary channels: In the second quarter, booked revenue on the company's mobile apps and websites grew faster than booked revenue from OTAs.
Simply improving on this trend could boost RevPAR, irrespective of new rooms the company adds to its various markets. Proprietary channels represent a competitive strength with a direct impact on both Marriott's top and bottom lines.
Discounted offers are only available to new members. Stock Advisor will renew at the then current list price. Average returns of all recommendations since inception. Rather than replace the two apps, Melnick employed IBM WebSphere to combine the best of each and introduced a new standard desktop.
In the resourceful spirit of "reuse before buy before build," he explains that he used as much of the existing batch architecture and code base as possible and bought the WebSphere to combine them in a more flexible Web-based environment. The final product enabled the IT department to reduce the number of support personnel and integrate the hardware the system required. At the corporate level, collapsing and upgrading the two independent systems has enabled Marriott to improve the accuracy of its reservation forecasts and lift lodging revenue 20 percent, according to Amy McPherson, senior vice president of global revenue management and the business owner of the system.
If a company is going to be resourceful, IT and the business better be aligned. They must sponsor any new initiative and retain ownership for the life of the system. The result: Marriott employees, whether in IT or marketing, are on the same page. Marriott would start to build a hotel, and then the business would say, I want a different kind of restaurant or room layout, and people just kept changing things around.
Today with IT, says Shaw, "the business has to put a stake in the ground" to prevent that costly and time-consuming back and forth. Therefore, as resources become scarce and the IT department has to become hyper-resourceful by, say, halting certain projects or introducing new cost-cutting systems, the business is already on board and changes can be made quickly and effectively.
When hard times hit recently, this teamwork came in handy. The problem, as Wilson puts it, was "We have what I call a very facing culture. In the hospitality business, you greet people and the cultural preference is to do a lot of things face-to-face. But teamwork kicked in. Here are the latest Insider stories. More Insider Sign Out. Sign In Register. Sign Out Sign In Register. Latest Insider. Check out the latest Insider stories here. More from the IDG Network.
Marriott Rewards Innovative Employees.
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