Marriott's Brian King on Corporate Appetite

• The state of business travel
• Deploying Marriott Modern
• Expanding the Delta brand

Marriott International may be in a waiting period for final approval on its merger with Starwood Hotels & Resorts, but it hasn't slowed down or put its plans on hold. The company is working with corporate partners, expanding its Marriott Modern renovation program and developing the Delta Hotels and Resorts brand in the United States. BTN lodging editor Julie Sickel spoke to Marriott International global officer of brand management and global sales Brian King.

BTN: I know it's early days in the RFP season, but how are group and transient corporate demand looking from your side of the table?

King: We continue to [go after group business], and that's been an initiative of ours for quite awhile. On the transient side, demand has still been pretty good. People were cautious about this year, and that cautious approach was the right approach. It's actually materialized fairly well. More on the positive side than the negative side, frankly. There is a lot of apprehension about global business travel today because of the recent [terrorist attacks], and people are cautious about when and where they're deploying their workforce and how they do it the right, meaningful way. But I do think there's a lot of resilience in business travel. We're definitely in the Golden Age of business travel. You've got countries with huge emerging markets that are on the road. When you think about the globalization of business, you can't sit at your desk and really understand, whether you’re doing a call with your top customer, or visiting your associate or manufacturing facility. You can’t manage from your desk in a global economy; you have to be out in the marketplace.

BTN: Marriott's executives have mentioned multiple times on earnings calls the company's success with "reducing special corporate business." Is that still something Marriott is trying to do?

King: What we do, what is very different, is the hotel business is about micromarkets. Each individual hotel is a micromarket on its own. Those particular hotels are going to use the pricing practices that make the most sense in that micromarket. There are certain accounts that might have more global distribution than others. Then there are very local targeted accounts that just service one or two hotels in a market and they have a relationship with those hotels directly. What we're trying to do is find the fair balance of trade between what the hotels need to do to satisfy, frankly, the ownership responsibilities [and] at the same time take great care of customers in a way that's meaningful to them and the appropriate cost to do that. We take the long view on pricing. There will be ups and there will be downs. As long as we're working together through this, over time the partnerships will continue to be strong.

BTN: Are you seeing a shift in the industries you're serving?

King: Obviously oil and gas has been challenged. There's been a bit of a reset in that vertical. Pharmaceutical and government continue to be really strong. High-tech continues to grow and almost feels recession proof. Professional services has been on fire … growing by leaps and bounds. A lot of those companies have a very young workforce, as well, so making sure our company has this Millennial mindset has been important to us, as well.

BTN: Have you fielded any complaints from travel managers about Marriott's new loyalty member direct booking discounts?

King: The truth: If you're a true volume buyer for Marriott, you're going to have a discount that's much more than 2 percent. Our Marriott Reward member rates are only 2 percent, weekdays. It really has not proven to be an issue, and I've not received one single phone call about it.

BTN: What's happening with the Marriott Modern renovation program for the Marriott Hotels brand?

King: We're rolling them out. If you think about the chain itself, we really stepped back and said, "What does the future really look like for this chain?" It's our premier chain; the first lodging chain that we had is our signature brand Marriott Hotels. We interviewed over 6,000 customers, and we have focus groups around the world. One of the main things that we learned was the way our room was currently designed—it was too, believe it or not, work focused. One traveler said to me, "I don't need a room that has a bed and a desk. It felt like an office with a bed." We heard that loud and clear. So how do you take a room—we're not rebuilding the entire hotel—redesign it for the modern traveler, modern aesthetic? Get rid of the big clunky furniture, the giant armoire with six drawers. No one used that. They're living out of the roller boards. Design around the way these customers are really traveling. We've slimmed down a lot of the [furniture]. We're working on putting hard surface flooring in the rooms. Seventy-five percent of all the rooms will have [just] showers. That's a big investment that we're removing bathtubs. Business travelers don't take baths; they take showers. It's just that simple. There are also large television entertainment centers with Netflix.

BTN: Marriott acquired Canadian hotel brand Delta Hotels and Resorts a little over a year ago. Where does the brand stand?

King: We are fully deployed with all of our systems and infrastructure with Delta. We're building these platforms at scale, but they have their own brand personality along the way. Our first Delta in the United States opened in December in Orlando, and we have more than a handful in the pipeline. It's been a great acquisition for us. We always had really good north-to-south distribution, but across Canada, East-West, we didn't have that distribution, so it's helped us lock up the entire country.