Marriott Bonvoy Is Recruiting Three Travelers to Journey Through Its 30 Extraordinary Brands

Around the World in 300 Days: Marriott Bonvoy Is Recruiting Three Travelers to Journey Through Its 30 Extraordinary Brands

Around the globe, intrepid travelers have been longing for the opportunity to embark on their next great escape and channel their primal need to wander. Today, Marriott Bonvoy – Marriott International’s portfolio of 30 extraordinary hotel brands and highly awarded travel program – is giving the ultimate gift of exploration to three lucky adventurers: an invitation to experience all of its 30 hotel brands, including its curated collection of whole home rentals, and more over the course of 300 days. The price tag is free, but the value is incomparable.

Inspired by Marriott Bonvoy’s belief in the power of travel, winners will experience exceptional stays extending from The Ritz-Carlton and Westin Hotels and Resorts, to Courtyard by Marriott and Autograph Collection Hotels, and more. The winners will also have the chance to take part in money-can’t-buy experiences from the Marriott Bonvoy Moments program, immerse themselves in the locale, and stay in one of the 50,000+ curated premium and luxury home rentals listed on Homes & Villas by Marriott International, the home rental platform launched by Marriott in 2019. Ultimately, winners will experience the breadth of travel programs and services Marriott Bonvoy now offers.

Travel perks for each winner will include:

• Round trip airfare

• Exclusive experiential adventures

• $10,000 Marriott Bonvoy Gift Card to cover items such as on-property meals, spa services, and activities

• $15,000 check to use as desired

• “Take Me Away” kit featuring coveted items from the branded online retail stores on Marriott Bonvoy Boutiques

• Vouchers for transportation from Uber, where Marriott Bonvoy Members can link their accounts to earn Marriott Bonvoy points on select rides and Uber Eats food delivery

• Progression towards Marriott Bonvoy Elite Status, giving participants the opportunity to unlock exclusive benefits like late check-out, room upgrades, and more, even once their 300 day travel experience is over

Those interested in experiencing this once-in-a-lifetime adventure can submit a TikTok video using the hashtags #30stays300days and #contest from January 18 through March 18, 2022 – ultimately, becoming a Marriott Bonvoy TikTok Correspondent. Marriott Bonvoy invites all adventurers 21 years or older to share why they would be the best candidate for this experience and answer the question, “how has travel shaped you?”– bonus points for creativity. Three individuals will be selected and begin their journey in spring 2022; dates subject to change in accordance with CDC guidelines.

“Our goal with this initiative is to reignite passion for travel in leveraging Marriott Bonvoy’s portfolio in a creative way with a digital-first mindset. Travel is without a doubt one of the strongest tools we have to bring people together, broaden horizons, and foster growth all with an unwavering spirit of curiosity,” said Brian Povinelli, Senior Vice President, Brand, Loyalty & Portfolio Marketing. “We’re excited for our TikTok correspondents to embrace the transformative power of travel and showcase Marriott Bonvoy as the vehicle to explore the world through this once-in-a-lifetime experience.”

As the official Marriott Bonvoy TikTok Correspondents, winners will not only get to experience an all-expenses-paid trip across the globe, but also be ambassadors of travel - documenting the sights, sounds, places, and people they encounter along the way on TikTok and other platforms of their choice. Ideal correspondents should have a passion for exploration, recording their journey in ways that bring locales to life and shows their distinct perception of travel through a digital narrative. The story should be as creative as it is original, producing content that reflects the energy and culture of a place that reinforces just how essential and cathartic travel can be.

Marriott Bonvoy has evolved from a rewards program to an immersive and inclusive travel platform that includes everything from hotel and home rental stays to retail and experiences. The power of travel goes deeper than sightseeing and checking off destinations on one’s bucket list; travel can change views and perceptions, inform, educate, and connect.

For more information about Marriott Bonvoy or to enroll as a member for free, visit here. For more information on how to become a Marriott Bonvoy TikTok correspondent and rules, visit www.30stays300days.com. No purchase nec. 21+, 50 US/DC. Ends 3/18.

About Marriott Bonvoy®
Marriott Bonvoy’s extraordinary portfolio offers renowned hospitality in the most memorable destinations in the world, with 30 brands that are tailored to every type of journey. Members can earn points for stays at hotels and resorts, including all-inclusive resorts and premium home rentals, and through everyday purchases with co-branded credit cards. Members can redeem their points for experiences including future stays, Marriott Bonvoy Moments, or through partners for luxurious products from Marriott Bonvoy Boutiques. To enroll for free or for more information about Marriott Bonvoy, visit marriottbonvoy.com.

Ian Schrager's The Times Square Edition hotel to close permanently

key Take Away

Ian Schrager's decadent hotel in New York's Times Square is closing just over one year after it opened due to financial issues caused by the pandemic

The news comes as the drops in business during the pandemic resulted in a cash shortfall that put the hotel's developer Maefield Development in default of its contract with Marriott International

The Times Square Edition had been temporarily closed since late March when New York governor Andrew Cuomo placed the entire state on "pause" and ordered all non-essential businesses to shut

For more information

www.dezeen.com/2020/05/21/ian-schrager-the-times-square-edition-hotel-close-permanently/?

Marriott announces North American, international leadership changes

Long-time Marriott International senior executive Dave Grissen has decided to step down from his position as group president, the Americas, toward the end of 2020 and retire from Marriott in the first quarter of 2021

Grissen leads all aspects of the company's biggest region, the Americas, which generates more than two-thirds of the company's fee revenues

Under Grissen's leadership, Marriott's Americas organization has grown from 2,928 hotels to 5,640 properties today, with another 1,800 hotels in the pipeline

New North American and International Leadership

Marriott also announced plans for the company's lodging operations to be consolidated under two long-time Marriott leaders after Grissen steps down from his current role. Under this plan, Liam Brown will take on the role of group president, North America and Craig S. Smith will take on the role of group president, International.

Brown currently is group president, Europe, Middle East & Africa. Brown was president, Europe, and before that, president, select brands and owner and franchise services, North America.

The company expects that David Marriott, currently president, U.S. full service, managed by Marriott, will join the company's board of directors in 2021

Latin America’s Hotel Construction Pipeline Remains Sluggish at the Close of the First Quarter of 2020

In the recent Latin America Hotel Construction Pipeline Trend Report, analysts at Lodging Econometrics (LE) state that the total construction pipeline stands at 702 projects/124,050 rooms, down 2% by projects and up less than 1% by rooms, year-over-year (YOY).

In the first quarter of 2020, 22 new hotels/3,825 rooms opened throughout Latin America, while new project announcements into the pipeline recorded a new all-time low of 36 projects/3,596 rooms

Mexico leads Latin America’s construction pipeline with 222 projects/40,639 rooms. Next is Brazil, standing at 137 projects/22,607 rooms. Peru follows with 41 projects/5,702 rooms; Colombia is next with 36 projects/5,899 rooms and then the Dominican Republic with 33 projects/8,105 rooms. Collectively, these five countries account for 69% of the rooms in the total pipeline.

Cities in Latin America with the largest pipelines include Lima, Peru with 31 projects/4,691 rooms; Mexico City, Mexico with 26 projects/4,358 rooms; Cancun, Mexico with 23 projects/11,234 rooms; Sao Paulo, Brazil with 18 projects/3,294 rooms; and Guadalajara, Mexico with 18 projects/2,302 rooms.

Top hotel franchise companies in Latin America’s construction pipeline are Marriott International with 129 projects/22,571 rooms, AccorHotels with 98 projects/13,049 rooms, Hilton Worldwide at a record high 88 projects/12,345 rooms, and InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG) with 61 projects/7,116 rooms. These four companies account for 54% of the projects in the total construction pipeline.

The top brands in the pipeline are AccorHotel’s Ibis brands with 67 projects/8,868 rooms, Hampton by Hilton with 25 projects/2,952 rooms and Hilton Garden Inn with 23 projects/3,189 rooms. These are followed by Marriott’s Fairfield Inn with 17 projects/2,489 rooms and IHG’s Holiday Inn Express with 17 projects/2,075 rooms.

COVID-19 did not have a full impact on first quarter 2020 Latin America results reported by LE. Only the last 30 days of the quarter were affected. LE’s market intelligence department has and will continue to gather the necessary global intelligence on the supply side of the lodging industry and make that information available to our subscribers. It is still early to predict the full impact of the outbreak on the lodging industry. 

Marriott International Ranks #1 On DiversityInc Top 50 List

Marriott International, Inc. was recognized as the #1 company for diversity across industries on the 2020 DiversityInc Top 50 Companies for Diversity list. The ranking also makes Marriott the highest-ranking hospitality company on the list for more than ten years and the only one to have achieved the top ranking. 

Marriott's success in the diversity and inclusion space is based on a 360-degree cultural approach encompassing results-oriented metrics and initiatives supporting associates, customers, suppliers and owners. This approach had led to signature accomplishments such as collaborating with leading human rights nonprofits on human trafficking prevention training and leveraging TakeCare, its award-winning employee wellbeing program, to advance the practice of diversity and inclusion in the modern workplace.

 The company has been recognized for its talent development programs with a long list of notable and lifetime achievement awards, including - Working Mother 100 Best Companies Quarter Century and Hall of Fame, Black Enterprise Best Companies for Diversity, a repeat LATINA Style Company of the Year, Asia Society Best Companies for Asian Pacific Americans, National Association for Female Executives (NAFE) Top Companies for Executive Women Hall of Fame

Marriott plans to spray disinfectant in guest rooms, sanitize keys to stop COVID-19

From spraying guest rooms with disinfectant to sanitizing room keys, hotel giant Marriott International became one of the first major hotel groups to outline how it plans to reassure guests of cleanliness in the age of the coronavirus

Guests may notice some of the changes from the moment they step into a Marriott property: Furniture in public areas will be rearranged to promote social distancing.

Marriott's promise of a new level of cleanliness may be an early sign of changes that will sweep the hotel industry as chains and individual properties compete to lure guests by offering the most coronavirus-resistant environment. The strategy could be critical to trying to create a rebound for hotels as stay-at-home orders are lifted and travel resumes.

In perhaps the biggest change, Marriott said it will use electrostatic sprayers with hospital-grade disinfectants to sanitize throughout the hotel. Besides guest rooms, the sprayers will be used in lobbies, gyms and other public areas. It said the cleaning agents used would be those recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization to kill all known pathogens.

The company is testing ultraviolet light technology for sanitizing room keys, and adding hand sanitizer stations and signs in the lobby to remind anyone who enters to keep their distance from others. Marriott is also taking a look at what to do at properties that offer buffet service.

Marriott reveals another security breach: 5.2 million guests exposed

A Marriott International franchise property may have been the source of a data leak that compromised information on up to 5.2 million hotel guests The breach involved the login credentials belonging to two employees; the incident happened in mid-January and was discovered by Marriott in late February 2020. The intruder’s access has since been disabled.

The latest breach

The security breach was discovered when Marriott found that ‘an unexpected amount of guest information may have been accessed’ using the two aforementioned compromised employee credentials. Those logins have since been disabled and the company has been investigating the security breach, as well as increasing its monitoring

If there’s an element of good news regarding this latest Marriott data breach, it’s that for now, at least, ‘the company currently has no reason to believe’ that certain vital guest details were accessed, including things like driver’s license numbers, bank card info, PINs, passport data, or national ID information. Certain sensitive details were potentially exposed, however.

Going forward

Security breach involved things like gender, birth dates, work company, loyalty account points and numbers, email addresses, phone numbers, mailing addresses, and names.

Not the first time

This isn’t the first time Marriott has faced a large security breach. In early 2019, for example, the company revealed that up to five million unencrypted passport numbers belonging to hotel guests had been exposed by its system. That breach involved the Starwood reservation system and impacted up to 383 million guests who stayed at one of the properties before September 11, 2018.

We Will Travel Again - An Update from Marriott International CEO Arne Sorenson

I want to let you know how we’re focused on supporting the communities where our associates live and work. I also want to provide you with an update on our room cancellation policy and Marriott Bonvoy status and points expiration dates.

In the Community

Marriott understands that the pulse of the world beats as one to overcome COVID-19 and its devastating impact around the globe.  To that end, we have established the following programs to aid in the urgent fight against the pandemic.

With support from our credit card partners, American Express and JPMorgan Chase, Marriott has committed to provide $10 million worth of hotel stays for healthcare professionals leading the fight against COVID-19 in the United States. The initiative, called Rooms for Responders, will provide free rooms in some of the areas most impacted including New York City, New Orleans, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Washington, D.C. and Newark, N.J. To implement this initiative, we collaborated with the American College of Emergency Physicians and the Emergency Nurses Association to match doctors and nurses with free accommodations at participating hotels.

In a separate effort for frontline healthcare workers, we have joined with a number of our hotel owners and franchisee partners to launch the Community Caregiver Program. This initiative, available in the United States, Canada, the Caribbean and Latin America, provides significantly discounted rates for first responders and healthcare professionals who want to book rooms at hotels in close proximity to the hospitals where they’re working. The rate is available on Marriott.com at nearly 2,500 hotels.

With both initiatives, our goal is simple – we want to support the frontline heroes who are selflessly supporting us.

For Our Customers

We remain committed to ensuring our customers experience flexibility during these challenging times, so we have further extended our cancellation policy and I wanted to give you an update on those changes.

For guests with existing reservations for any future arrival date, including reservations with pre-paid rates that are typically more restrictive, we will allow full changes or cancellation without a charge up to 24 hours prior to arrival, as long as the change or cancellation is made by June 30, 2020. Please note that any changes to existing reservations will be subject to availability and any rate differences.

For guests making new reservations for any future arrival date, including reservations with pre-paid rates, between March 13 and June 30, 2020, we will allow the reservation to be changed or cancelled at no charge up to 24 hours before your scheduled arrival date.

For Our Marriott Bonvoy Members

• Status Extension: We want you to be able to enjoy the status that you earned in 2019. With that in mind, the status you earned in 2019 will be extended to February 2022.

• Points Expiration: To provide you ample time to redeem points, the expiration of points will be paused until February 2021. At that time, your points will only expire if your account has been inactive for at least 24 months.

Marriott International Lights Up Across Asia Pacific To Spark Hope

Hong Kong -- Marriott International across Asia Pacific will light up its properties to send a positive message, offering a ray of hope to the communities they are in for locals and travellers alike. The "Light for Hope" initiative looks to spread positivity amidst the challenging times the world is currently facing.

 Over 270 hotels across various cities and regions, from Seoul, Tokyo, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Saigon, Jakarta, Maldives, Mumbai and many more have lit up their hotel rooms to the symbol of a smiley face, as seen from the façade of the hotel. The symbol was chosen to project a happy demeanour radiating positivity, with hopes that it brings a smile to the faces of everyone who sees it.

"In times of uncertainty one thing remains certain - we are in this together, and we will come out stronger", said Craig S.

Putting people first is at core of Marriott International. Hotels across Asia-Pacific have been going above and beyond to demonstrate the extraordinary collective power of people to help others

In these challenging and unprecedented times, associates from hotels across Asia Pacific have volunteered over 40,000 hours to serve their communities

Throughout April, guests and travellers can view the "Light for Hope" initiative at select Marriott International hotels across Asia Pacific.

Marriott International Notifies Guests of Property System Incident

Hotels operated and franchised under Marriott’s brands use an application to help provide services to guests at hotels. At the end of February 2020, the company identified that an unexpected amount of guest information may have been accessed using the login credentials of two employees at a franchise property. The company believes that this activity started in mid-January 2020. Upon discovery, the company confirmed that the login credentials were disabled, immediately began an investigation, implemented heightened monitoring, and arranged resources to inform and assist guests. Marriott also notified relevant authorities and is supporting their investigations.

Although Marriott’s investigation is ongoing, the company currently has no reason to believe that the information involved included Marriott Bonvoy account passwords or PINs, payment card information, passport information, national IDs, or driver’s license numbers.

At this point, the company believes that the following information may have been involved for up to approximately 5.2 million guests, although not all of this information was present for every guest involved:

• contact details (e.g., name, mailing address, email address, and phone number)

• loyalty account information (e.g., account number and points balance, but not passwords)

• additional personal details (e.g., company, gender, and birthday day and month)

• partnerships and affiliations (e.g., linked airline loyalty programs and numbers)

• preferences (e.g., stay/room preferences and language preference)

  Marriott is sending emails to guests involved. Marriott has also set up a dedicated website (www.mysupport.marriott.com) and call center resources with additional information for guests. The call center resources can be reached by calling the numbers listed on the dedicated website. The email sent to guests and the website also contain a list of steps guests involved can consider taking and information about enrolling in a personal information monitoring service that Marriott is providing.