Marriott International hopes to help travel agents learn how to sell hotels better as it sets on revamping its online training programme for a global audience.
The hotel group will soon have more than 20 brands and wants to not only train agents in those but also about how to sell hotels so knowledge is on par with the airline industry.
“We are starting to work on relaunching the Marriott Excellence training programme to help agents familiarise themselves with our brands and become more effective at selling hotels. Traditional agents are more used to selling air so we want to help them start to sell hotels in the same way,” said Phillip Andreopolous, VP global sales, Europe at Marriott told Travel Daily. “It’s important to excite and educate people to differentiate; there is a concern of commoditising the hotel industry and that would be the worst thing for travellers as hotels are so personal to people. People want to feel confident about buying a product with the knowledge that the agent knows the type of place they want to stay in.”
He added the ‘time is right’ to relaunch the programme as the hotel chain’s developments continue to grow, with its venture with Protea in South Africa to bring even more brands and properties to its portfolio.
The new training platform will include more brands and languages and allow it to reach more buyers worldwide.
“We understand that having numerous brands can be confusing but it is our job to differentiate each so the customer knows what they are getting,” said Andreopolous. “We know we can’t have too many brands because of the diverse customer base out there; our hotels do not always cater for a particular demographic.”
With a strong pipeline in Europe Marriott hopes one day its awareness will be as strong in the US, where some of its brands are often all found down the same street.
MOXY is its latest new brand with an affordable ‘bleisure’ concept, while the EDITION is similar ethos but a higher standard level.
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