Marriott's Pusateri Jumps Into The Internet Fire

<FONT SIZE="+3"><B>Newsmaker: Marriott's Pusateri Jumps Into The Internet Fire</B>

By Cheryl Rosen

Starting out the New Year with a leap of faith, Marriott's Mike Pusateri is about to begin 1997 swimming with the current of a new channel. As the chain's first-ever vice president of interactive sales and marketing, Pusateri's mission is to pull together a team of corporate, agency and technology partners to build a model for doing business in the nascent online environment.

In short, if you're a beta tester, an early adopter or an Internet impresario, Pusateri wants you.

A month into his new job, the former vice president of business travel sales acknowledged he has few answers-and indeed, he is still defining the questions.

"The first question is whether the Internet is smoke or fire," Pusateri said. "And while there is not yet a consensus in the industry as to the answer, I wouldn't be taking this job if I didn't believe it was the latter. "

The next question, he said, is whether Marriott can build and enhance its customer loyalty over the Internet. "We think we can do that, and we will soon know for sure, because we are pulling out all the stops and diving into this," he said. "The projection for next year is that corporate America will have four times the number of intranet servers they do now, and many of those will be linked to preferred travel suppliers. I think those systems are going to have an impact on the compliance of travelers with corporate travel programs, and we are going to be a part of it."

So far, Pusateri has gathered 12 Internet and distribution people into one department with a singular vision: to develop interactive commerce, both in the consumer market over the Internet and in the corporate market over private intranets.

"What we need now are companies with Internet applications to align with us-software developers, third-party Internet solution providers, and corporations and travel agencies that are ready to beta test," he said. "Where in the past we were interested in talking to the biggest corporations, now we are looking at the most technically advanced. We are seeking out partners, whether they are Microsoft or some guy in his garage, that are the furthest down the road."

To date, Marriott has booked about $1 million worth of Internet sales-and while Pusateri said that's "a drop in the bucket" compared to the chain's total revenues, "it's growing, and the potential is far greater."

Even while he expects continued growth in leisure bookings, Pusateri sees the real potential for 1997 in direct connections with corporate customers over intranets, where the issues of security and speed are easier to resolve-and the financial returns can be shared with buyers and their agencies. Defining what those benefits are, and working out an equitable split of the booty, is perhaps the most important part of Pusateri's agenda.

"It's hard to talk in a generic nature now about the economics of these deals," he said. "There are so many different deals that this is going to be a one-on-one discussion that evolves over time. But the way we do things now is labor-intensive and expensive. When technology extracts those labor costs, there will be a cost savings that somebody is going to benefit from, whether it's the agency, the corporation or the CRS. My job over the next two years is to figure out who will benefit, and how.