Marriott estimates mobile sales worth $1bn in 2013

Marriott International expects the total value of mobile sales in 2013 to reach at least US $1bn, president and CEO Arne Sorenson told Hotelier Middle East ahead of the group’s fourth quarter 2013 earnings release, due this week.

“We are seeing mobile reservations grow by leaps and bounds,” Sorenson told Hotelier Middle East in an exclusive interview in New York City earlier this year. “I think we will see that in 2013 we will do over a billion dollars of sales on mobile devices. That’s a massive increase.”

He said the company would “continue to do everything you can imagine in the mobile space”.

Most recently, it has implemented mobile check-in at 350 Marriott-branded hotels in the US, a strategy that it now being rolled out at Marriott-branded hotels worldwide.

“It is the broadest roll out of mobile check-in in the industry by far,” Sorenson asserted.

He said mobile “is the way we are all communicating with each other now”.

“Ironically if you look back a year or so ago, you get into a hotel and you try and communicate with a hotel with your iphone or whatever you’re carrying, it’s almost impossible to do it and you have to instead go to your phone on your desk and try and call for room service or do something in a very old fashioned way. Increasingly we’re going to integrate the hotel’s operations into the way our customers are using their devices.”

In addition to advances in the mobile sphere, Soreson added that more focus would also be placed on social media — in particular, online reviews via social media platforms.

“All of that is stuff that is being talked about. We are rolling out to the system today, broadly to all the hotels, a guest feedback loop that includes social media, so that all of our individual hotels can see what is being said about them by either their current guests or former guests or whoever has got views about their hotels, and they can both respond to that and monitor it and participate in those conversations.

“I think increasingly we will see that reviews will play a part in this in a more formal way, but we’ll work that out, nothing to announce right now,” said Sorenson.

For a full interview with Marriott International president and CEO Arne Sorenson, see the March issue of Hotelier Middle East.