October 7, 2016 Owner & Franchise Communications

Meetings Imagined Update | October 2016

In 2015, Marriott launched Meetings Imagined, a new global meeting strategy and an industry first. Meetings Imagined was designed to put the meeting purpose at the center of the planning experience. It’s supported by a powerful, innovative collection of tools and services designed to deliver inspiring experiences regardless of budget, size or location. We’d like to share an update on the industry-leading digital tools within this program: MeetingsImagined.com, WiFi Simplified, and Meeting Services App.

MeetingsImagined.com

MeetingsImagined.com is the first visual, social and collaborative website designed to change the way meeting planners, plan, shop and buy meetings. The website launched in June 2015 and currently has 761 participating hotels, up from 149 hotels at this time last year, representing six brands (JW, AUTO, RH, MH, GH and international CY) and provides content in six languages.

Hotels across the globe have shown great success using Meetings Imagined.com to drive top-line revenues, increase food & beverage sales, and grow associate engagement.

Since July 2015, Meetings Imagined.com users are more likely to submit an RFP and surpass Marriott.com in RFP conversions to a contracted event (5.9% vs 3.8%). Additional results since this time show $1.6M in contracted revenue, 230 contracted events and 3,900 RFPs.
Success stories from 28 hotels have resulted in $3M in top-line revenues, with 16 hotels in the Americas generating $2.1M.
Early Event Satisfaction Score (ESS) results indicate planners around the world like the support they’re receiving. MeetingsImagined.com planning experience scores are up by 2.8 points and the overall event experience is up by 4.1 points from July through September of this year.

Based on user feedback, significant website updates have also been made to simplify processes and address photo rejection concerns. Updates include:

Photo Dashboard: streamlines processes and positions photography tools in one place
Idea Boards: makes it easy to create and share ideas with planners
Hotel Showcase: launches in late-October and gives hotels a more powerful tool to promote their capabilities, while helping clients visualize their event in hotels.

WiFi Simplified

wifisimplified WiFi Simplified is an industry-leading approach for presenting meeting internet options to customers. The program is live as of September 12 in five full service brands in the U.S., Canada, and CALA (RC, JW, AUTO, RH, and MH). WiFi Simplified provides clarity around Internet choices, bandwidth and price enabling planners to collaborate and quickly get to a solution that works. Furthermore, the program ensures that full service hotels have a consistent process in place to improve meeting planner satisfaction when internet is needed for a meeting or event. For the first time, Sales, Event Planning/Catering, Event Technology and iT have the training and tools to help them explain, qualify and sell meeting Internet solutions as one team with greater success.

No other hotel company currently uses this approach, giving Marriott’s owners and franchisees a key competitive advantage. Early results include:

560 hotels participating in the Americas
2,750 pieces of customized collateral completed by participating hotels
25,000+ training sessions completed by associates
1,000+ training sessions completed by AV vendors

WiFi Simplified Brand Standard

Effective January 1, 2017, WiFi Simplified will become a brand standard for RC, JW, RH, and MH brands in the U.S. and Canada. The standard will require these hotels to have the following program attributes complete and in place:

Training completed by Sales, Event Planning, Event Technology and Field iT teams
Internal and external collateral
Bandwidth reporting will be shared with customers, where available, and reports will be attached in CI and SFA Web post-conference

The effective date of the standard will be communicated to hotels in the Oct. 17 Weekly Update. Currently, the standard is not included on the Brand Standard Audit.

For more information visit the Wifi Simplfiied MGS page or www.wifisimplified.com.

Meeting Services App (MSA) Update

msalogo Marriott’s Meeting Services App (MSA) connects planners and hotel teams on web-enabled devices, in real-time, in order to create more time to empower, showcase and personalize every event from planning through billing and collections. MSA is now available across seven brands and is live in more than 850 hotels in 60+ countries, and works in the planners’ and associates’ preference of 20 possible languages.

Group Billing Enhancement – 2017 Americas Rollout

The next billing enhancement of the Meeting Services App will enable meeting planners to view daily bill charges by attendee and/or categories. Leveraging existing functionality, planners will be able to review, approve, or dispute charges. To continue to make the jobs of meeting planners’ easy, additional functionality will allow them to assign charges to custom-created cost centers, enabling instant billing reconciliation. Finally, planners will be able to set alerts to better monitor budgets, attendee charges, and other important items.

Beta testing is expected to begin in Q1 2017, with pilot and full implementation in Q2. For more information, visit the Meeting Services Implementation tab on MGS, or email MeetingServicesApp@Marriott.com.

Brand Standard

As announced earlier this year, effective July 1, 2016, MSA has been added to the BSA for JW Marriott, Renaissance Hotels, and Marriott Hotels in order to measure compliance. The standard requires all hotels with interior meeting space to offer MSA via a custom event link to meeting planner customers. Hotels must introduce / demonstrate MSA functionality to all meeting planner customers in order to meet continent usage goals as a brand standard. View the full standard for details.