Enhancing the Arrival Experience
Challenge
The Marriott Brand and Loyalty teams were looking for unique opportunities to enhance the member experience by providing personalized touchpoints throughout the guest journey. Personalization across digital channels was readily available, however it was particularly challenging to execute on property, specifically upon arrival to the hotel. At luxury hotels, staffing models could support manual operational processes to facilitate this, but those models were not cost effective at scale beyond the luxury brands.
Hypothesis
A hypothesis was developed that technology could enable associates to better recognize and more proactively engage with guests. Guests, would feel more welcome when staying at hotels with more personalized interactions, therefore having a positive impact on the arrival experience and intent to recommend scores. We framed the initial challenge around first evaluating if hotel associates could greet a guest by name upon arriving at the hotel, then by quantifying and measuring the impact of that simple interaction to the arrival experience.
Role
This was one of the first projects to go through the Hotel Labs framework. Initially the Loyalty team was looking to test RFID luggage tags, however the technology was not cost effective and difficult to implement, even at small scale. I was able to direct the Loyalty team to the Hotel Labs platform, and leverage some of the technology that I had recently deployed as part of a marketing orchestration platform (BLE and Mobile Location Services).
I was responsible for forming and leading the project teams that would perform the user research, develop a MVP product, and test in market. There were two iterations of this experimentation, the first using locations services (BLE, beacons, and GPS), and the second leveraging facial recognition technology..
Results
The Hotel Labs platform was successfully utilized to support both of these projects. Customers at two hotels were able to opt-in to participate in an enhanced arrival experience and afterwards provide feedback (qualitative and quantitative).
There was a very clear correlation in the customer satisfaction metrics, with a very large, 15 point increase in the arrival metric being monitored. However, technology costs and privacy concerns/risks were ultimately a deciding factor in not scaling this program. Ultimately, several of the lessons learned have been applied across other channels, including work within the global Salesforce CRM platform integration.
