Marriott upgrades reservations system

Marriott International has rolled out a revamped website featuring an enhanced reservations system that makes booking online easier and more intuitive for customers.

The frontend of the revamped site now presents a customer-friendly display of room products and rates, which are categorised into tabs such as weekends on sale, hotel deals, packages and meetings and events.

The Reservation Process pages highlight the hotel’s name and brand more prominently.

"It allows our customers worldwide to book faster than before, with few steps and more information at their fingertips," said Luis Babicek, director of international e-commerce at Marriott international.

"Customers told us they wanted a faster way to find and compare rate types, deals and packages offered at their preferred hotels," he added. "They also told us they wanted an easier way to join Marriott rewards, take advantage of Member and Elite Offers, earn points and combine rates."

The new features of the enhanced reservations systems are:

    •    Room/Rate Product Categorisation – Room/rate products are categorised into tabs, facilitating readability and decision making. Within these categorized views, users is able to sort by rate, room type or price/point total.

    •    Mixed Redemption Rates – Up to recently Marriott Rewards members redeeming points for multi-night stays could benefit from PointSaver rates, but only when those rates were available for all nights of the stay. With the upgrade, customers are now able to book PointSaver rates for individual nights of a multi-night stay (with the standard redemption rate applied for nights when PointSaver is unavailable).

    •    Process Streamlining – Signed-in customers are now able to skip steps where the customer’s profile can provide all the needed information.

    •    PreferencePlus Guarantees – Customers with PreferencePlus numbers are able to use them to guarantee room reservations, rather than having to use a specific credit card number. For such reservations, the actual credit card number to which room charges will be billed will be obtained upon check in.

    •    Inline Enrollment - Users who are not currently Marriott Rewards members are now able to enroll in Marriott Rewards while making a room reservation.

    •    Inline Activation – Marriott Rewards members who have not yet activated their accounts for online access are now able to do so while making a room reservation.

    •    Pre-confirmation Editing – From the “Step 3 – Review” page, customers are now able to return to previous steps in the reservation process and update information.

Meanwhile, Marriott Rewards members can now decide faster whether to redeem points with the Simultaneous Display of Cash and Points Rates. Customers searching for redemption rates will see cash “starting from” rates in the Search Results page along with point redemption rates.

Also, Marriott customers now have the ability to resume an in-progress reservation at a property from the Search Results page.

The new reservations system can be accessed by Marriott customers worldwide. It is also available in localised versions in countries such as the UK (Marriott.co.uk), Germany (Marriott.de), Latin America and Spain (Marriott.com/espanol), China (Marriott.com.cn) and Australia (Marriott.com.au).

For more details, go to www.marriott.com

Gigi Onag