Homes & Villas by Marriott International
Delivering growth by building a global home rental platform
How Marriott honors their promise to be the “world’s favorite travel company”
Marriott wanted to create a brand-new type of travel accommodation for their loyal hotel guests: a short-term rental experience. The company partnered with Publicis Sapient to offer the comfort and convenience made popular by challengers, with the trust and long-term relationships that are hallmarks of the Marriott brand.
The Imperative for Change
In order to compete with industry disruptors and online travel agency players, Marriott needed a new approach to customer experience and product management in the short-term rental market. Since COVID-19, many guests have become more comfortable in private spaces. So, the hotel company decided to double down on Marriott Homes & Villas (HVMI).
The Transformative Solution
Publicis Sapient and Marriott built an evolutionary platform marketplace on a complete cloud-native, microservices-based architecture. This innovative solution caters to the unique preferences of Marriott's 140 million+ global customers, applying guest data and machine learning to curate the trip of a lifetime, staycation or “bleisure” trip with personalized suggestions and offers, all within the Bonvoy ecosystem.
The use of the AWS cloud platform, which includes services like Amazon ECS, Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka, OpenSearch and Amazon CloudWatch, allows Marriott's employees to exercise greater agility when creating solutions for guests. The platform is equipped with enhanced global monitoring, security, and supports for surges in demand with AWS CloudTrail, AWS Config, AWS X-ray and Amazon GuardDuty, and is actively managed and supported in real time by Publicis Sapient.
“Publicis Sapient and AWS have been critical in the successful growth of our platform to this point, and I am confident that our selection of partners has us well positioned to capture even more market share as we scale our business in the coming years.”
The Impact
Publicis Sapient transformed HVMI into a full-scale platform from just an MVP in six months.
Over the next 12 months, the platform incorporated many new features, integrated with 20+ partners, added thousands of listings and grew the number of bookings and revenue by over 2x year over year.
The solution covers end-to-end processes, from inventory management, reservation processing, card and Bonvoy points redemption to reporting and financial reconciliation capabilities.
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