Marriott.com gets a refresher

November 18, 2009 | Hospitality Industry

Marriott has unveiled the new look of Marriott.com, the world's 7th largest online consumer retail site, according to Internet Retailer. The improvements include a modernized look and feel, more intuitive layout, and one-click guest access to their Marriott Rewards® account from anywhere in the site.

These customer-driven changes are the first in a series over the next year.

“Marriott.com is the largest point of interaction with our customers. It receives more than 12 million visits each month and more than 75 percent of our guests say they use our website when planning or booking their hotel stays,” noted Shafiq Khan, senior vice president, eCommerce for Marriott International. “When we surveyed guests, they gave Marriott.com the highest satisfaction rate—92 percent—of all possible booking channels. Today customers make 2,000 times more bookings in an hour on Marriott.com than they did in 1999, making it our company’s fastest growing booking channel.”

Despite the success and exponential growth of the site, intensive customer testing revealed new visitors could find the site confusing, and often left and booked hotels elsewhere. Marriott reached out and involved its customers in evaluating multiple new design concepts for Marriott.com, ultimately landing on one that those customers described as “innovative,” “simple and easy to use,” “intuitive to navigate” and “more interactive.”

For the redesign, Marriott kept aspects of the site that were working well for frequent guests, but have now also made it much easier for a large under-served segment of newer customers to navigate, find, and book what they need on Marriott.com. This in turn will generate more revenue and cut booking costs. The changes also take effect on Marriott’s international websites in the United Kingdom, Germany, China, Latin America, Australia, Japan, Korea, Brazil and France.