When you are planning a trip and need to choose a hotel at your destination, how do you go about making that choice? For many people, the decision about which hotel to book depends on why they need it and what they want from the experience. For example, suppose you’re headed on a big family beach summer vacation complete with multigenerational travelers including kids—clearly you’ll want a choice location on or near the beach! But you’ll also want other amenities such as free high-speed Internet, free Wi-Fi, spacious rooms (suites preferred), free breakfast, free parking, a swimming pool for when the beach gets “old” for the kids but they still want to get wet, a refrigerator, a microwave, and a location close to family restaurants and other family-friendly activities. Given this profile, a logical choice might be a hotel such as Fairfield Inn and Suites that is clearly positioned for low-priced but quality amenities and is highly family-centric. Alternatively, what if you’re a married person and want to get away to someplace a bit upscale to properly celebrate your 10th wedding anniversary? The grandparents are watching the kids for a couple days (lucky you) and you want a nice place in the city where you can enjoy some luxury and pampering that you do not often experience. In this case, your want room service, a full-service spa, a fitness center, a pool, high-speed Internet, a comfortable and spacious room with a nice view, a location with top restaurants and shops nearby, and a general attitude from hotel staff that “it’s all about you.” For an excursion like this, a JW Marriott in a downtown location like the one in Manhattan will fill those needs nicely. But what if you instead are a frequent business traveler, traveling along and seeking the regularity of a business-focused hotel? Your needs will yet again be quite different from the two scenarios above. In this case you want a comfortable room, basic bar and food service on the premises, easy check-in and check-out, a business center with free printing, an exercise room, and meeting space for connecting with clients. Here, a Marriott Courtyard makes great sense. In case you haven’t guessed, each of the above hotel brands is operated by Marriott. In fact, Marriott has 18 different lodging brands, each of which targets its appeal to different market segments with different needs and wants with varying accommodations and amenities. The super-luxury market segment, where the hotel service staff call you by name and know whether you like a feather or foam pillow, is well-served by Ritz-Carlton and JW Marriott. Are you a meeting planner booking a large convention and meeting space along with enough guest rooms to accommodate your company’s sales force for a national meeting? No problem—many of the full-service Marriott Hotels and Resorts will love to work with your market segment. On the other hand, perhaps you need a company that can provide accommodations for your employees that are relocating to a new location or are on a temporary assignment and need long-term housing of up to a month or more. For this market segment, Residence Inn by Marriott or Marriott Executive Apartments is a terrific option. Bottom line, Marriott has done a superb job of recognizing the various market segments that exist in the lodging industry and developing brands and appeals to differentially target each of those segments. Such a strategy includes all types of differentiation— geographic, demographic, psychographic, and behavioral. Based on the needs and wants of the different segments, a positioning strategy is developed that communicates the distinctive features and value-added of each brand to its target consumers. Despite Marriott’s broad market coverage, they continue to look for opportunities to identify under-served markets. Indeed, they recently announced the introduction of one of their European-based properties, AC Hotels, to the United States. This hotel chain is designed to appeal to younger Gen Y and older Millennials, who are more technology and design-savvy than any of Marriott’s current market segments. Marriott expects to open 200 AC Hotels in the next 10 years. Those locations will feature an urban lifestyle environment where customers can stay constantly connected through social media in coffeehouse-like spaces—in short, a lodging experience designed to appeal to this important emerging target market. Since members of this segment are expected to spend $34 billion a year on hotel rooms in the near future, the time is ideal for Marriott to add this new edgy and urban brand to its lucrative line of properties. 

Questions for Consideration

1. Go to Marriott’s website (www.marriott.com) and peruse the different types of lodging brands offered. Select any three and based on the discussion of differentiation in the chapter, identify the relevant sources of differentiation offered by each.

2. Even with all of Marriott’s brands, they still do not have any hotel properties in the truly “budget” category of lodging. That’s a category occupied by properties such as Days Inn and Budgetel. Why do you think Marriott does not have a brand in this category of lodging? Do you think Marriott should enter this market segment, and, if so, provide an idea of what a budget Marriott brand might be like.

3. With 19 different lodging or extended-stay brands under the Marriott corporate umbrella, is Marriott at risk of making any positioning errors discussed in the chapter? That is, do they have too many choices? Justify your answer.