Originally Posted by
thebackcourse
Only those with MARSHA access and even they would have to know how and specifically look. Its far, FAR, from being across the board at all properties and even then your front desk worker at 1am is unlikely to know how to do so unless they've been there a while and actually have access.
In general they have no reason to look nor care where else you might be booked. They're just as overworked as the rest of us and have little time to nose around. Many of them at wearing 15 different hats at this point(house keeping, night audit, front desk, security, insane demand meeter, etc...)
MARSHA is an old as dirt command line system that even most elite agents and their managers don't have access to because marriott in their infinite wisdom doesn't think they need it. Its not user friendly at all and isn't something thats remotely simple to learn. So the people that have access and know how to use it are few and far in between.
I've haven't worked at a Marriott property in a bit but if you do, correct me if I'm wrong/things have changed.
MARSHA access isn't up to Marriott to grant but up to the GM of the individual property. In principle anyone can get it but the property gets billed by corporate for however many users it has the same as corporate bills a property for each [MENTION=590560]marriott[/MENTION].com email address a property has which is part of why access is to each is limited. (That's why a lot of limited service franchise brands might have a corporate email address for the GM and Sales Manager but everybody else at the desk is using one or more shared or property-centric generic Gmail accounts).
The second reason was that overall aside from the GM and the Sales Manager, if you're a typical limited service property who else would need to have access? If you were in MARSHA it wasn't too look at guest profiles, (that was a whole different system) it was primarily to make/change/modify your property's inventory/rates or to make reservations.
Although you could also see inventory/check confirmation numbers/see in house guests at any property globally (I use to look at who was in house at the RC Central Park and see all of the fake names celebrities/athletes would be using - rather amusing stuff). While there was a MARSHA training course it was as old and as draconian as the system itself is. You basically learned it by fooling around from a basic cheat sheet each property had and hoping you didn't mess something up - assuming of course you ever got access. If you wanted to see past reservations/stays then you had to go into OSCAR which is even more esoteric system that even fewer people knew.
Like I said, I'm sure things have changed but at least when I used MARSHA it wasn't the end all be all system that people here refer to it as. You had to know FOSSE or FSPMS, MARSHA, OSCAR, GuestWare and one other one that I'm forgetting if you needed/wanted full access to everything.