Originally Posted by
WasKnown
There was a thread about this on Reddit a month ago. Not really sure how credible this information is but they claim that people at luxury Marriott hotels will do this to provide a more personalized experience.
https://www.reddit.com/r/marriott/co...eb2x&context=3
https://www.reddit.com/r/marriott/co...eb2x&context=3
Notable quotes:
"We try to find anything we can about the guest via Google or social media, especially if it’s a special occasion (anniversary, birthday, etc; they’ll get a different amenity for that)."
"It was my team’s job to find out anything we could about a guest and use it. Examples: if we see you’ve requested extra towels in multiple previous stays, we’ll place extra towels in your room before you get there. If you’ve complained about noise while in your room, we’ll assign you away from elevators or away from guests who may be loud or have kids. If you prefer milk chocolate over dark, we’ll use only milk chocolate for your turndown. If you’re allergic to feathers, we’ll prepare the room feather-free.
List goes on! That’s the luxury hotel difference."
I know for a fact that employees at a USA Ritz Carlton and an international St. Regis have googled me before. However, I have never received this level of personalized service at a Marriott hotel I haven't already been to (though other hotel brands are better at this). Seems like it's either cap or very property specific
A ritz might have such a team, that would make sense and they would have the resources to be able to leverage that info to make your stay better. The average single FD employee with maybe a manager around for some of the day hotel will not have time to do all that for every guest..or even half their guests.
MARSHA is what our booking software interfaces with for inventory. My understanding, and this is just coming from a call taking monkey perspective, the res stays in MARSHA til its pulled into the hotel's PMS system of choice(there's, I think, 4 different PMS in use at the properties). Once in their system it stays there til check out and post processing at which time it gets pushed into another system. Thats why you see your stays disappear for a day or 3 after check out til the folio is finalized and posted to the account. If the stay is 3rd party usually it will no longer be visible after check out and post processing. People don't seem to understand there's so many things that impact how quickly a stay posts and get all bent out of shape if it doesn't go exactly like they think it should. Group blocks are a prime example. Those will not post until the ENTIRE block is processed. So if you have a couple stragglers out there...everyone's stay is held til they can process the entire block. But people still call thinking it is exactly like the 1 night member rate res they booked last week that posted 4 hours after check out. It's not. Everyone wants the block rate, no one wants to wait for the block to be processed lol.
Anyways back to marsha, basically, everyone that makes or works with reservations technically has marsha credentials but very very few are trained to use marsha. And marsha commands don't make much sense. Like in DOS dir=directory...in marsha it could be some random character and a random special character changes a name. Which makes it hard to learn if you don't have someone showing you what to do and a cheat sheet of the commands.
I tried to get trained as marsha would enable me to better serve the escalation calls I take...but my manager at that time didn't think I needed it. Nevermind that the legacy marriott employees that work in the exact same job title taking the exact same calls were marsha trained. Nevermind that we have to call to a marsha help desk at least once a day sometimes 2 or 3 for relatively mundane things. I already had the access already knew how to login I just needed someone who knew it to show me around. "That's a negative ghost-rider, the pattern is full"
Its a massive company with all the usual massive company bureaucracy and silo-ing of information. I just want to do my job and irritate the guests as little as possible.