Marriott Website Offers Customized Search Options
Enhancing its year-old Web booking site, Marriott Hotels & Resorts is offering travelers the ability to map out an entire business trip and search for restaurants near their hotel, while giving meeting planners the ability to scope out properties with enough amenities and meeting and sleeping space to accommodate their groups.
More than 16 million businesses and points of interests are listed in the interactive mapping system that Marriott licensed from Vicinity, Palo Alto, Calif., and included on its site. The site (www.marriott.com) also lists details of Marriott's 1,200 properties across eight brands.
"If you're staying at the Boston Copley, it gives you a map and/or turn-by-turn directions to an appointment. If you want to go to a Chinese restaurant nearby, it will give you six or seven options within a 20- mile radius, along with directions to the closest," said Mike Pusateri, vice president of interactive sales and marketing for Marriott, Washington, D.C. Following details on specific hotels, users will find a yellow pages to help search for the closest restaurants or other categories they enter.
In the meeting section, planners can search all Marriott properties to find those offering specific amenities. They also can list the minimum and maximum number of guest rooms, meeting rooms, square footage and room capacity by the various room setups they require. The search engine then will produce a list of properties that meet those requirements. Floor plans and room dimensions of meeting properties also are available online.
To check availability or book a room, planners must phone or fax each hotel or national sales office. "We're not sure that booking meetings online will be of high value now," Pusateri said.
Conceptually, Marriott is shifting the focus of its site from product to customer service, making it easier for business segments to access information and book reservations, Pusateri said. For example, the opening screen features buttons to quickly take meeting planners, agents or travelers wanting to make reservations to their respective areas. Marriott also added dialog boxes to ease navigation. Users can search the entire site or that of a particular Marriott brand for specific information or a hotel closest to a street address.
More than 250,000 users are visiting Marriott's site each month and booking rooms. The site debuted in 1995, with the booking tool added last June.
Surveying 7,000 Web users earlier this year, Marriott found that 71 percent most frequently access travel information, followed by financial planning and entertainment. More than 40 percent were members of Marriott's frequent guest program, with 70 percent visiting the site for the first time.