Category Archives for Hotels.
Arne Sorenson thinks Marriott can out-Airbnb Airbnb by offering consistency, products, and service. His daughter tried an Airbnb once and assures him there’s nothing to worry about there.
If this is a growing piece of the market, Marriott needs to be in it. And they think that they can leverage their loyalty program to make it more attractive to customers.
Probably the most famous hotel complaint ever is the 2001 Powerpoint Yours is a Very Bad Hotel created by Tom Farmer and Shane Atchison from Seattle who showed up at what was then the Doubletree in Houston. Though they had guaranteed reservations they were being walked and the desk clerk couldn’t have cared less.
I was reminded of that complaint when I saw this video of a front desk clerk losing it at the Country Inn & Suites in Newport News, Virginia last week.
Loyalty has two primary components: recognition and reward. That’s your elite program and your earn and burn proposition.
Hotel programs are tough to compare because you earn a different number of points per dollar spent, and redemptions vary wildly as well — the most expensive Hyatt redemption is 30,000 points while the most expensive Hilton redemption costs 95,000. We can normalize that by looking at the number of points earned, and the value of each point.
Marriott’s legacy program offered lifetime 75 night elite status, and those who already achieved that status in the Marriott program, or who achieve it through Marriott-only activity by the end of the year, get to keep it. Starwood elites weren’t going to be given that opportunity.
We see people checking out of a hotel and that’s normal. We need to get more used to people checking out of homes in our neighborhoods. Because that means getting used to more types of people, more people who ‘look different’, and that happens by making it more commonplace.
It’s a reminder that anti-Airbnb ordinances are often cover for deplorable motives. And hotels spending money on front groups to lobby against Airbnb should be ashamed of themselves too.
Through June 15 if you check into your hotel using the Starwood Preferred Guest mobile app you’ll receive 250 bonus points. The promotion applies to St. Regis, The Luxury Collection, Sheraton, Westin, Le Meridien, Tribute Portfolio and Four Points brands only.
Shortly before Starwood announced a deal to be acquired by Marriott it agreed to spin off its timeshare business into a separate company, Vistana, which it sold to Interactive Leisure Group or ILG. ILG now holds the vacation ownership businesses of Hyatt, Sheraton and Westin.
Marriott Vacations is now buying Interactive Leisure Group for $4.7 billion. So an affiliate of Marriott will wind up owning the Starwood timeshare business Marriott itself was believed not to want two and a half years ago as well as Hyatt’s timeshare business.
Marriott is enforcing wall mounted toiletry dispensers in the showers of their managed North American properties. They’re not the only ones going in this direction, it’s cheaper and they get to pretend their motivation is the environment.
I have five concerns with wall mounted dispensers replacing individual bottles.
Hyatt has a little over 600 hotels. That’s one-tenth the size of Marriott. There’s Marriott, Hilton, IHG, and Accor as players and there just aren’t chains in Hyatt’s peer group anymore.
They did try to buy Starwood themselves but their complex stock structure (two tiered stock giving outsized control to the Pritzker family) was a stopper and Marriott bested them. They tried to buy Kimpton but IHG was willing to pay far more.
One of the aspects of Marriott’s announced new program that seems to annoy Starwood’s most loyal customers the most isn’t even where something is being taken away from them.
Under the new program all current lifetime elites keep their current lifetime status, even though the new program is going to have tougher requirements than the Starwood program did to earn that status.
Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel -- a topic he has covered since 2002.
Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »
