NEW YORK CITY — As large-scale meetings and conferences resume after two years of virtual and hybrid events, hotel companies are finding ways to meet new expectations from planners and attendees.
Several leaders from Marriott International gathered at The Edition Times Square late last week to share updates on how the company is adapting to the changing environment. They were in town for The Exchange, Association Masters & Corporate Partnership Conference held at the Marriott Marquis, where an estimated 400 sales representatives and general managers from the U.S. and Canada met with an equal number of corporate and association meeting professionals to discuss new demands for both corporate and leisure travel.
Group and Business
Julius Robinson, Marriott’s chief sales & marketing officer, U.S. & Canada, noted that despite the uptick in occupancy, some of the company’s customers have not attended a meeting in more than two years. “So it's important that we, as an organization, stay focused on making sure they feel confident about the travel experience [and] ease of use,” he said. Just as importantly, he said, the company is looking to give its customers best practices they can use for their own meetings.
Marriott’s business travel bookings are not yet back to 2019 levels, said Drew Pinto, global officer for global sales, distribution and revenue management—but he blamed this on booking windows for larger groups. “The small groups are back, if not exceeding, where we were in 2019,” he said. Several months back, Marriott’s “special corporate business” was down as much as 40 percent from where it had been. “We've been improving by several percentage points every month,” Pinto said, adding that the decrease was now down in the “mid-teens.”
Small group bookings like sports teams and weddings came back first, Robinson said, but have moved beyond the traditional full-service properties into the select-service brands as well. In addition, Pinto said, companies with a large number of remote workers are using hotels to meet up when they bring teams together. These meetings often are seeking lower-priced suburban properties that may be closer to where people live rather than where they have traditionally worked.
When group customers are booking larger properties, they are now seeking blocks of up to 900 rooms two months or 45 days out. “As we talk to customers today, because of all the volatility that's out there, they don't see that trend changing,” he added.
Another notable trend is that customers are looking for more rooms than they had initially requested. Robinson sees two reasons for this: “One, the meeting planners are a little less confident about what's going to happen with attendance and so they are a little more conservative in what they contract,” he said. Secondly, attendees are eager for events that have not been held since before the pandemic, so demand is higher than normal. “So there's a lot of conversation back and forth with the hotel on trying to add more rooms and trying to provide more space and flexibility.”
Leisure Travel
Robinson said Marriott is seeing “great demand” from leisure customers, and hotels are adapting to new needs from this segment—“as an example, extending food and beverage hours at times when you have high demands [from] families in transit.”
Leisure-focused markets that recovered quickly during the pandemic are still going strong, Robinson added, but urban markets that often cater to business travelers are now reporting improved occupancies. “In this last quarter, we've seen not a shift but an addition of customers moving into the urban market,” he said. “It's no longer just about Florida, Arizona, Southern California and the mountains. It's now New York and Chicago and even markets like Seattle, which have been down for a while, [that] are showing really good signs of recovery.”
Pinto also acknowledged the recent JD Power survey that found overall guest satisfaction in U.S. hotels was down 8 percent. Much of the dissatisfaction, he said, might come from reduced housekeeping service and limited amenities leftover from the pandemic. The company is responding by increasing focus on members of its Bonvoy loyalty program, and Pinto said internal satisfaction scores had improved. Improved communications about what a guest can expect upon arrival have also helped improve satisfaction.
Sustainability
Denise Naguib, Marriott’s VP of sustainability and supplier diversity, said that people, in general, are more aware of environmental concerns and want to see changes in the meetings they attend and the travel experiences they book. “Both on the leisure and the meeting side, we are very much seeing the sort of the groundswell of the traveler on communicating their demand and desire for responsibility.” To that end, every hotel in Marriott's portfolio now has a sustainability tab on its website to share information with both planners and travelers.
Minimizing food waste and carbon footprints during meetings and events is a growing priority among planners and attendees alike. “We are trying to provide tools [and] resources for the meeting planners as well as our hotels so that they can work through these challenges,” she said.
Reducing carbon footprints and food waste is not about composting after an event or donating leftover food, Naguib added: “It's really understanding how [to] plan for a meeting most effectively to reduce the food waste from being created.” Marriott also is finding ways to offset carbon emissions from meetings, which Naguib acknowledged is not a “be-all [and] end-all solution” to the climate crisis. “But from a meeting perspective, it's a really impactful way by which meeting planners can move the needle on this and help their attendees and their stakeholders understand that they can hold a meeting responsibly by doing these things,” she said.
The company has also developed its own internal teams resources on using disposable materials—like plates and cutlery—at events, and ways to use reusable materials instead. “Making sure that, end to end, the solution is the right one for whatever that product is so important—as opposed to the perception of if it is or isn't sustainable,” Naguib said.