Selected Marriott Projects
Protea Hotels Brand Site
After Marriott acquired Africa’s largest hotel chain, there were many questions: How would their customers feel about their home-grown brand being subsumed by an American company? Would they link from the re-designed Protea brand site to Marriott.com to book a room? What is the South African mental model for booking?
The findings from the research we conducted in Johannesburg and Cape Town informed every aspect of this site.
Prominent phone number – Unlike on Marriott’s other global sites, the reservation number is prominent and sticky because 1) the South African mental model is that users are more comfortable talking to a human than booking online, and 2) South African internet speeds are notoriously slow. Interestingly, even when they do book on the site, they immediately follow up with a call to the hotel to confirm the reservation.
Dual loyalty – Research also revealed that Protea customers were fiercely loyal to the company’s original loyalty program – which prompted us to retain it and simultaneously introducing them to Marriott’s program.
Marriott who? – None of the participants was familiar with Marriott hotels (although one person thought we sold car insurance). I took this as an opportunity to introduce our new market to all 30 brands with a non-threatening message inviting them to “Meet the rest of the family.”
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Just what Google was searching for
Google’s employees were booking hotels via Expedia and other unapproved sites rather than going to Marriott.com for their pre-negotiated corporate rate . Our major accounts group challenged us to create a scalable, flexible experience that worked for them and other large customers. Pre-pandemic, the platform increased Google employee bookings by 68%.
WordPress to the rescue – The platform was recently sanctioned by Marriott and checked a few important boxes, most importantly allowing sales reps to author and edit content (within the bounds of our governance).
Booking made easy – Google employees automatically get their corporate rate without having to enter a promo code.
Rapid response – reps are able to quickly respond to Google’s changing travel needs as well as Marriott’s competition by adding content modules to the page.
B2B and B2C – our regional teams adopted the platform to push out their offers to leisure travelers.
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Hotel development
One of Marriott’s highest priorities is to keep the pipeline of potential hotel owners and developers full at all times. Of course, a website itself won’t convince anyone to plunk down hundreds of millions of dollars. However, it’s a valuable resource for demonstrating why Marriott provides superior ROI for investors – and a great sales tool for Marriott account executives to use when meeting with clients.
For this 60+ page site, I worked with the stakeholders to:
Develop the basic site information architecture
Present a large volume of metrics clearly and repeatably across brands and regions
Define editable/non-editable content areas
Write/edit the content
Ensure compliance with accessibility and digital design standards (including writing alt tags for hundreds of photos)
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