Corprate Code
 

I am revising our corprate travel policy and wanted to get a corp code with Marriott. I called in and was told that I have to negoigate with each individual hotel. Seeing as I have 10+ people on the road at any given time and they stay all over the US this will take way too long. Is this correct?

It seems odd that I can not set this up with corp. Has anyone done this before?

I don't foresee you getting much of a discount with only 10 people out there. I work for a company with 110,000+ people, and rare are the decent corporate discounts at Marriotts, especially nowadays when they are booked full a lot of the time.

I've often negotiated rates but only with the individual hotels. Sometimes you luck out and get a district sales rep who oversees several hotels where you have people staying but that has only happened to me once in the past 5 years.

It would be great if Marriott would do this from corporate but they are probably too large a company to get into those details.

I've also tried to negotiate with Hilton hotel chains and they've worked the same way

My solution will not work in your case, but what I've done is called the individual hotel to arrange a negotiated rate for myself. Rate was lowered from $159/night to $95. ^ Thanks, Starwood.
Now I just have to dump 380,000 points I have in Marriott due to smoking policy.

One of the managers at my company did this with a Full-Serve Sheraton a couple of blocks from our office. Our guy just walked over and negotiated a $99 rate, to be exact. This was almost 50% off rack rate, and he felt like a real stud. That is, of course, until the first time he tried to use it. Bigwigs from NY office came in. The guy with whom our manager negotiated refused to honor the rate! No special event, etc. But hotel nearly sold out, and the GM just figured he could fetch a higher rate either from us or someone else.

I sat there thinking how I've never encountered that sort of junk from Marriott!

There are many factors which go into pricing an account's rate and without going into a long (and most likely boring) discussion on it I'll just say it's quite common to have Last Room Avail (LRA) rates and Non-Last Room Avail (NLRA) rates, what your manager agreed to was "NLRA" meaning the hotel could restrict it's avail just like the airlines do

There is a service called RFP Express that allows you to receive bids from many hotels with a small amount of effort. You decide what to do with the bids you receive and they will even make a web page that your travelers can access that shows all the properties where you have rate agreements. They do both LRA and NLRA rates. My experience suggests it is generally good to request both rates from the hotels unless you have a particular hotel that you have travelers staying in all the time. Then you may want to negotiate a LRA rate that is good all the time. You can also negotiate other amenities as part of the bid if that interests you.

https://xform.rfpexpress.com/

I have no relationship with RFP Express other than I know they serve my organization. I don't have any direct contact with them.

Charles

There are a few others out there but right now for the life of me I can't think of their names but RFP is the largest out there, I have no idea what it would take to use their service