Marriott Plans To Export E-Folio Data Services

Marriott is preparing to extend its e-folio data service for corporate clients outside North America for the first time. Program director for lodging finance Randy Jones told Business Travel News that the hotel company hopes to have 300 properties overseas offering the enhanced data by the end of 2010. It also intends to introduce an e-folio data supply from all of its Ritz-Carlton properties within the United States by the end of 2009.

E-folio data provides what is known as level-three management information via travelers' corporate payment cards. It enables buyers to see on card statements the same details that travelers receive at checkout, including a full breakdown of all items of expenditure and taxes. Card statements from hotels that do not supply e-folio data only specify the total charge amount.

Marriott has 2,800 hotels from its main brands in the United States and Canada providing e-folio data, but until now, as has proved the case for other major chains, it has not been able to offer clients the same service in other countries. The main reason for that has been that Marriott hotels outside North America use a wide variety of property management systems, each of which would have to be enabled in a different way to provide the enriched information.

The international breakthrough has come courtesy of a deal between Marriott and the hotel technology provider Micros-Fidelio, whose Opera property management system is used by Ritz-Carlton in the United States. Micros-Fidelio is enabling the latest version of Opera to provide e-folio data for those properties and the same technology will then be applied to the several hundred Marriott hotels overseas that also use the updated version of Opera.

However, Jones said that it is not technically possible simply to convert all Opera-using Marriott properties to e-folio with "a flick of the switch." Instead, each has to be enabled individually, which is why no timetable can be guaranteed.

"It is laborious and expensive," she said. "If our corporate clients truly want this, they need to be vocal about it. If there is more adoption by global clients within the United States, that will speak far louder volumes than simply saying they want it. Introducing e-folio outside North America presents many more technical and financial challenges, but once we have it for Ritz-Carlton in the United States, it will be easier to bring on internationally."

Marriott currently provides e-folio data to more than 1,000 corporate clients in North America.