Marriott

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

How can we redesign the arrival and pre-arrival journey, for rewards members, to increase customer loyalty and customer appreciation?

In this project we focused on ethnographic and stakeholder research to create a high level strategy that integrates smoothly with the Marriott brand and infrastructure.

PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITIES

Project lead
Visual communications
Presentation and storytelling
Research lead

DELIVERABLES

Portfolio of service design solutions
Implementation strategy

Arrival experience redesign

The Marriott came to us with the challenge of redesigning and identifying opportunity areas in the arrival experience in order to increase member loyalty.

We set out to meet this challenge by using the design process, from observations to in-depth interviews, synthesis and analysis, secondary research and strategic considerations. We created solutions that are desirable by the user, technologically and technically feasible and financially viable; these solutions are part of our cohesive portfolio called Marriott Unburdened.

Arrival, pre-arrival and pre-pre-arrival

Through our research we found that the arrival experience can be enriched by considering what happens before arrival.

We saw that the journey that various loyalty members take to get to their hotel was strongly related to their arrival experience and their stay. Using this mindset we were able to re-frame the existing Marriott framework to create better opportunity areas. Through our four solutions (mapped above) we wanted to target various pain points in our users' journeys. We created a cohesive portfolio of solutions that stand together or as stand alone solutions. We present, Marriott Unburdened.

Bellair

Our hero solution is Bellair and it targets business travelers and consultants who are burdened by their luggage at work and dinner before they have time to go to the hotel.

Bellair allows guests to drop their luggage off with Marriott bellboys at the airport who then use the existing Marriott transportation infrastructure to move the luggage to the appropriate hotel.

During our final presentation this solution got praise from Marriott's innovation team as a brand new and rich opportunity area.

mText

We found that Marriott does an excellent job of keeping track of user preferences and allowing the guests to request new services through the Marriott app but we wanted to make it even easier.

The app has a barrier to entry that we wanted to get rid of. mText is a text system, operated by Marriott's existing At Your Service staff that messages guests before they arrive to ask for their preferences and whether they'd like any preferences repeated from their last stay. The guests can reply and have a conversation just as they would with any friend.

Beeline

Our research showed that us that name recognition and anticipation of needs is of utmost importance to our guests; it can really differentiate their experience.

Using geo-location and geo-fencing we wanted to speed up the check in process and provide Marriott an opportunity to be better prepared for their guests. When the guest is near the hotel both the guest and the check-in agent receive notifications about check-in. The guest can walk right into the hotel and be handed their key, so that they spend less time waiting and more time interacting with the staff the way they want.

Mobile Closets

For our most frequent guests, who return week after week we've developed Mobile Closets. These guests already leave some items with the hotel so that they don't have to transport them, so we wanted to make a service out of this opportunity.

The guest can leave their clothes in the designated Marriott garment bag in their room. The hotel will store and clean (if requested) their clothes to be ready for the coming week.

An extension to this service has Marriott shipping their clothes from hotel to hotel so that if you are traveling to Zurich next week we can take care of your clothes, so that they are waiting for you in your room in Zurich.

Strategy

For each one of the Unburdened solutions we created executive summaries and detailed service plans so that Marriott can easily implement our solutions.

As mentioned before we considered desirability, feasibility and viability for each solution and ranked them accordingly so that Marriott can know the risks, benefits and next steps to each solution.