Marriott International earlier this month launched a new awards program, offering meeting planners points that can be redeemed for individual reward travel or corporate meeting services. The points-for-planners system, always popular as well as controversial, is far more extensive than any such program Marriott ever has implemented.
Under the terms of the program, dubbed Marriott PlannerPoints, planners who register with Marriott's promotional Web site and book an event at a participating Marriott Hotels & Resorts full-service property receive one point per room night booked and can earn up to 2,500 per meeting. Three weeks after a meeting contract is signed, the points can be redeemed for chain gift certificates for services at future meetings or converted into the chain's reward points. There appears to be no set mathematical formulae for determining conversions. A PlannerPoint generally is worth slightly less than $3 in gift certificates and can be converted to between 400 and 475 reward points, depending on how many PlannerPoints the planner owns. The program affects meetings booked through Dec. 31 and held before March 31, 2004.
Marriott's previous program was similar but offered far less in rewards, said Marriott senior vice president of global and field sales Roger Dow. Unlike the new program, the older version would not allow planners to accumulate points over the span of several meetings.
"They still work and they're still popular," said meeting guru Joan Eisenstodt, president of Washington, D.C.-based meeting management consultancy Eisenstodt Associates. "There's a lot of junior people planning meetings, and these programs are designed for those people. They're not targeted at senior planners. They offer a carrot for personal gain. Business is down, and everyone wants to enhance it."
Such programs are well known in the meetings industry and have proven controversial
(Meetings Today, Sept. 20, 1999). Though studies have shown that a significant amount of professional and nonprofessional planners have, at some point, earned and redeemed such planner points, many planners believe the programs insinuate that their site-selection decisions can be swayed by personal rewards. Also, many planners who have attempted to consolidate or centralize meeting planning operations have cited the reluctance of nonprofessional planners to give up planning responsibility as a major stumbling block to success, a situation some think is exacerbated by such programs.
Dow said the option to use accumulated points to defray corporate meeting expenses shows the chain is acting responsibly. "You have the option to earn and accumulate points to offset costs," he said. "We've had a lot of pushback that we should offer something that lets planners return points to their companies. That's the main ingredient, and it's different than years ago. Now, people don't know if it's right to get a free vacation. You want something for your company, and we can offset your costs. Quite clearly, our goal is maximum cooperation."
Others in the industry, though, were unconvinced. "It's inappropriate," Eisenstodt said. "Facilities need to sell on their merits, and we as planners need to understand that what benefits us can't be part of the process because it's not our money. Hotels could go a long way to advance the ethics of the industry by just offering the points to the organization without offering the opportunity for personal redemption."
Some corporations have developed policies regarding reward program usage, ranging from guidelines forbidding points as a factor in site-selection decision making to requiring that all points be transferred to the company.
Frequently, points-for-planners programs are offered by a single property or a handful of properties of the same chain in a particular region. There are some chains, however, including Starwood Hotels & Resorts, that offer them as a standard perk. "It's one more reason to be part of the considered set," Dow said. "We're going to see competitors with similar products in the set, but this is another reason to pick up the phone and call us."
"Our company has a policy against personally benefiting from a business transaction," said Craig Ardis, director of special events at Amway Corp. of Ada, Mich. "We're very conservative on that. Frequent flyer miles are different, but we had the discussion as to whether or not they should go to the company or individual. We decided to give it to the individual as a perk because they are away from their families, but that does not extend to this program."
"We are not allowed to collect points for booking meetings," said Barbara Cummins, Florham Park, N.J.-based assistant director of meeting management services at PricewaterhouseCoopers. "We can collect points from individual transient hotel stays, but no person in the company can get any group points at all for anything."
Yet, points for planners can pose a challenge to strict policy interpretation, as in this case: Is receiving points to defray the costs of future meetings noncompliant in and of itself? "I don't have a problem with it if it goes back into another meeting," Ardis said. "If there's a benefit from going there, and we can earn a bunch of points, that's fine. The company is spending the money, so the company is receiving the benefits."
"We'll have to see how that relates to our vendor policy, but my gut reaction is that it's not worth it," Cummins said. "It's just enough to look bad, even if it benefits the whole firm. It's a gray enough area to look like we booked a hotel for that purpose."
The program applies to participating full-service Marriott Hotels & Resorts and Renaissance Hotels & Resorts properties in the United States, Canada, the Caribbean and Mexico. About 300 properties are participating, representing about 85 percent coverage.