Marriott International has spent the past three years and roughly $1 billion simultaneously replatforming its central reservation system, its property management system and its loyalty platform.
As the digital transformation of the world's largest hotel company enters its final stage, artificial intelligence (AI), or at least AI rhetoric and investment, threatens to upend the industry.
Marriott EVP and chief revenue and technology officer Drew Pinto spoke with BTN executive editor for hospitality Julie Sickel about the technology rollout's next phase, Marriott's approach to corporate travel partners and where AI is—and isn't—already reshaping the business.
Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Where does your technology replatforming effort stand?
We moved into deployment phase this year, and we're up to 1,700 hotels in the U.S. and Canada. Our goal is to deploy to all hotels globally over the next year to 18 months. We're learning a lot. Our property management system in these hotels is 42 years old, so there's some training to do, but they do love the new system. It's more intuitive.
What kinds of capabilities will those system updates open up for Marriott and its customers?
Some of things we'll be able to do is allowing a guest to choose more details about the hotel and the room they want to book. Our hotels have really differentiated rooms, and they've never been able to sell those. Something like a corner room—there are different corners and different views.
We're also going to be able to do better service around requests. If you need a crib or a refrigerator, we're going to be able to fulfill those a lot better. We'll also be bringing in non-room products, like booking a tee time or a spa appointment, a restaurant reservation, transportation and have it all in one shopping cart and personalized to you, with different payment types.
Not everything will be completely rolled out on day one, but the platforms have been built for us to add all these things. We're going to view ourselves in this part of our business as a travel retailer, and we're going to really set up our products to make the customer experience be a retail experience like you would expect in other industries. That would include personalization, knowing who you are, customizing the content to make it most relevant to you, remembering your past searches or hotels that you've loved—all those types of things that make it fun to explore and shop and book travel.
You already teamed up with Spotnana to create Business Access by Marriott Bonvoy for small and midsize enterprises (SMEs). Are you exploring more direct technical relationships with travel management companies or corporate booking tools that would allow corporate travelers to have that retail-like experience you're talking about?
Some of these features and capabilities we're only going to be able to execute in our direct channels. Some of that's by choice, and some is the sophistication of what we're doing. But we're talking to all partners in the industry to figure out, for the content that we do want to distribute, where can we do it and how can we make this better? The state of the content and technology in the hotel distribution space, particularly when it comes to managed business travel, is really messy. That's why we're exploring every alternative we can find, whether they're established players or new players, to see who has the capabilities to distribute some of this and make that experience great.
The other thing we're doing is, we're working very closely with our corporate travel partners to ensure we have solutions if the customer does book directly with us. We want to make sure that we're fulfilling everything that they're looking for from duty of care, reporting, data transfer and, in some cases, settlement and payment.
We have no intention of violating or interrupting the way that they want their travelers to book. But what we're hearing more and more from our customers is that their employees want to be able to book with the best experience that they can, and they don't want to be restricted to tools that are inferior or to places where they can't get all the content and the data. Solution No. 1 is, let's help make that distribution better. Solution No. 2, which is equally important, is if they do come and book with us directly, let's make sure that our corporate travel managers are not just comfortable with it but on board and supportive and collaborating with us to do that.
Is that an interest you're seeing across the board, or with a particular program size?
One of the reasons we launched the Business Access program a couple of years ago is because we knew it would allow us to give a good experience for the SMEs who it would otherwise be really hard to get to and to give them this experience.
Some of the other things I'm talking about are at the enterprise customer level—those who have mature managed travel programs, who are quite sophisticated in this space and are the most vocal to us, saying, ‘Here's what my travelers and my employees like, here's what they don't like, here's the things that I, as the travel leader for the company, need to have.' And they've been great—we have customer advisory boards, they're very active with us, and they share what's going to be successful for us and for them in this space. It's helped guide us, but I would also not claim that we have it all figured out, nor do we have it all implemented. We're identifying opportunities as we go.
How are you tracking new capabilities and emerging corporate travel technology? Is it coming from these advisory boards?
We hear from customers. We also spend a fair amount of our time, certainly at the leadership level, looking externally and trying to be plugged into these spaces so that we see what's emerging. I have a small but mighty and very talented distribution and technology team in my group that's focused and dedicated to this space, to make sure that we're developing and innovating. I feel like we have a pretty good pulse out there. The very fledgling startups, we may talk to and learn from and keep a relationship with, but given our scale and the importance of this segment, we're not really willing to place big bets. We need players that can scale. In the AI space, there are other players we've talked and are exploring things with to keep our options open.
I think AI is going to be another channel that becomes available and plays a bigger and bigger role, and we'll start to maybe steal some traffic from other channels, but I don't think one channel will then become defunct.
Drew Pinto, Marriott
Speaking of AI, how much is AI search influencing your distribution strategy?
AI is already disrupting the paradigm around paid search and the model where you come into Google and we all compete for keywords—that's us competing against online travel agencies and other brands. More broadly, the way that customers start their shopping experience and their exploration experience is changing.
In terms of actual results and changing patterns of traffic, AI hasn't really had much of an impact. But we know, both as consumers and watching the behavior in the industry, this is where it's going. There are some pretty big proclamations out there, from one end to the other, of how revolutionary this is going to be. I think it's going to be another channel that becomes available and plays a bigger and bigger role, and we'll start to maybe steal some traffic from other channels, but I don't think one channel will then become defunct. It will just be another way that customers prefer to engage with us, and we see it as a really good opportunity for us to drive our direct business and to get introduced to more customers and form direct relationships with them.
We're preparing our content, we're working with all the partners, we're watching this very closely. One, because we want to learn and see how this changes our strategy. Two, because we want to influence the commercial models here. We don't want this to be set up in a way that can't be sustained by our hotels and our owners for the next 20 years. We want to make sure our voice is loud, and that we have a say at the table about what's going to work, so that everyone can benefit from this and it's not too one-sided.
I imagine the ability to more clearly highlight that non-room inventory, or the uniqueness of your rooms, comes into play, too.
That's right. This whole AI revolution, underneath it all, it's all about data, data quality and data access, because all the models have to be trained on that data. It's one of the areas of opportunity in the industry, whether it's hotel-level content or customer data or what have you, there's a lot of room for improvement in the hospitality industry. That's one of the things we've been investing in with this big transformation we're doing: to have much better data—things like content about the hotel and about the rooms.
You can imagine, as people get more specific about what they search for, where are you going to be able to find those things, and how are those models going to work? We are the owners of the content. We own the product. We're going to make sure that we use that to the best interest of our customers and our company.
How do you think about your AI objectives and governance? Where do you draw the line between agent automation and keeping a human in the loop?
I can't predict the timing exactly, but I think we're going to be very cautious about doing anything where a human's not in the loop—I think that's the No. 1 governor on this. We're going to, again, be very deliberate about where we get into places where things might be fully automated. But I would say, overall, our philosophy is we're human-centered, tech-enabled. The human providing human service and great experiences is what we do. That's the product we offer our customers and that's always our goal. It may be giving our associates at the front desk more capacity to engage with you more or giving them a chance to find your preferences and customize your experience a little bit better.
Of course, there might be some things that we can automate, but then we see that as an opportunity to shift some of that capacity to places where it's about the human touch. We want to make sure our people and our customers aren't burdened by all these manual, high-friction processes and tasks that are standing in the way of what they're really trying to do.
This story originally appeared on BTN.