Travel & Hospitality

Marriott International

Create a seamless customer journey across all platforms and services.

Overview

Marriott International is the world’s largest hotel company with 1 million+ employees, 30 brands, 7,000+ hotels, and 110M+ loyalty members. Its website gets 500M+ unique visitors a year.



Separate teams managed and maintained each brand, platform, and service, creating maintenance issues and a disjointed customer experience. We worked with Marriott leadership for more than six years. In that time, we led more than 40 strategic and tactical projects to:

  • Reimagine the customer experience across all digital touchpoints and services
  • Unite all digital teams around a shared design system, governance model, and improved process

The reimagined customer experience led to more revenue and happier, more engaged customers. The new design system and process are used organization-wide and have created better designs and more efficient, empowered teams that enjoy working together.


What We Did

  • New design system for 30+ brands
  • New responsive mobile app
  • Redesigned global booking site
  • Redesigned on-property systems
  • Design for 20+ services
  • Redesigned multiple on-property software platforms
  • New standards team, design process, and governance model
  • Branding and tone of voice for multiple brands
  • Vision for transformation and customer experience

Outcomes

200
%

$10B Revenue increase for Marriott in 4 years from reimagined digital products

$
800
M

Annual incremental revenue for Marriott from their new mobile app

31

Brands that co-exist in 1 design system for Marriott

7,200
+

Hotel properties migrated to new digital platform for Marriott in 1 year

15
+

New guest-facing services designed for mobile (service request, mobile key, etc.)

4.9

546K Reviews for the new Marriott Mobile app


Recognition
& Awards

Fast_Company_logo
Webby_Awards

3 Big Takeaways

  1. Let the customer journey lead the way
  2. Start with the product that has the most opportunity
  3. Design a flexible framework that allows for branding

1.

Let the customer journey lead the way

The Marriott customer journey is cyclical, and it’s common for business and leisure guests to simultaneously be in different stages. We clarified key moments in that journey to highlight the most significant revenue opportunities for the upcoming year. With funding secured, we worked with teams across the company to redesign products, services, and the overall design process.

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2.

Start with the product that has the most opportunity

Our approach to creating a new omnichannel design system is to start with one product. We led an internal redesign of the Marriott mobile app and used it as the genesis for the new design system. Once the app launched, we created mobile responsive design system files and interviewed more than 300 hotel guests as the foundation for our Marriott.com and booking path redesign.

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3.

Design a flexible framework that allows for branding

We designed the new customer experience so that Marriott’s 30+ brands could coexist and, when desired, offer a brand-specific experience at various points of the customer journey.

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