Marriot Liaising With Entertainment Media To Enhance Guest's Experience

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Jan 22, 2015

The days when guests at Marriot (MAR, Financial) hotel had to pay exorbitantly to watch their favorite movies on high definition television sets are going to become a history soon. People staying at Marriot won’t have to stream Netflix (NFLX, Financial) movies on their laptops to avoid paying high prices for the same. According to the reports of Bloomberg, the hotel chain is planning to offer access to Netflix, as well as Hulu Plus and Pandora (P, Financial).

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“We have invited leading technology companies and content providers to work with us to design the next wave in in-room entertainment focusing on on-demand programming”, John Wolf, a spokesperson for Bethesda Maryland based Marriott, told Bloomberg.

The future

This deal is indeed going to be very fruitful not just for the hotel chain, but also for the subscription streaming companies to make money. According to early reports, Marriott is trying to find a way to make Netflix and other services available in a package for free to guests who choose to stay in the hotel. Regardless of how the services are made available, Netflix, Hulu and Pandora are exciting options for potential guests.

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If this experiment proves to be a hit, we could be seeing Netflix, Hulu and more expand into numerous Marriott hotels and ultimately into other giants across the globe. With the given figure of 700,000 rooms in 79 countries, if the services become popular, it’s going to be a big boon for the business. Figuring out a proper business model could be helpful in streaming great revenue for those involved.

The hospitality company says, “The idea behind this deal is to renew the in-room entertainment system, and if offering Netflix it would means we don’t have to surf through the glitch prone slow services of LodgeNet (LNET, Financial), it’s a win-win for the consumer”.

The smartly dealt roadblocks

However, whether the visitors would be using Netflix or not is yet to be seen. A certain percentage of the visitors would be those who are on vacation. Such guests aren’t likely to take the advantage provided by the hotel, since it’s hard to imagine such visitors staying in a hotel room to watch old episode of Desperate Housewives. Definitely those people aren’t the target audience for this service. Hence, initially this service is going to be launched only in 8 branches of Marriott. Further expansion would be decided on the basis of the success ratios of the pilot testing project.

Luckily, whenever it’s about money making, businesses are remarkably swift to adjust. So, if it turns out travelers really do want streaming services in their rooms and will use them, either for free or for a small fee, then the roll out of the value added service will take place somewhere in the next year.

Concluding with the competitor

Amazon (AMZN, Financial) Instant Video is a star performer in the field, but it has been left out of the deal.

Netflix has grown faster than its nearest rival Amazon, which has declared its plans to produce and distribute movies. Netflix did announce this plan in September 2014 and will release its first movie later this year.

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Amazon doesn’t disclose its figures, but the number of prime members is speculated to be between 30 to 40 million in the USA. Given the prospects of the deal, both Marriot and Netflix stand to gain out of the outcome in terms of numbers. This new move from the hospitality giant signifies that they want to constantly improve the guest’s experience and thereby lure more footfalls into their establishments worldwide. This should see the business figures of the hospitality giant pickup significantly after it is rolled out formally till that time it would be best to keep an eye on the outcome of the pilot project.