Welcome to another Expert Insights discussion.
Today we are joined by:
🔹 Stephanie Smith – Founder and Digital Matriarch at Cogwheel Marketing
and
🔹 Connor Vanderholm – CEO and Co-Founder of Topline Revenue
NB: Cogwheel Marketing and Topline Revenue are Expert Partners
Today we talk with Stephanie and Connor about a number of the Marriott systems and reports, exploring how hoteliers can utlisise them to have the best commercial impact.
We look specifically at MRDW, MBOP, MarRFP, Marriott Plus and ICD
Hope you enjoy it 🤞👍
NB: There is a transcript below from parts of the discussion. Please note our transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors
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📝 TRANSCRIPT
Trevor Grant
So let’s get started. The first one first acronym, MRDW. Who wants to take this and first explain what MRDW actually is?
Connor Vanderholm
Yes, I don’t mind taking that one. So MRDW is the reporting platform and Marriott uses. And here you go you already you’re pronouncing Marriott correctly, but we all call it Marriott, but it is correct Marriott. so we’ll just go with Marriott you’re gonna throw me off.
So MRDW is a reporting platform. From revenue management standpoint, there’s quite a few reports that come through there. A number of our favourites are DAT1 report, which is going to be basic segmentation, DAT2 to is going to be kind of a sandbox for that same segmentation on revenue reporting, DAT3, a Seg10 report is more of a kind of a data dump, just this big, massive amount of data that you can then dump into a spreadsheet, which will chop it up for reporting purposes. But one that I just really want to point out, especially right now is going to be your MBV5 report, and the reason I’m saying the MBV5 is because there’s been some adjustments to the various, the Bonvoy reimbursements, the redemption schedule, and your MBV5 is where hotels can go in and find out where the redemption penetration is, find out at what the calculation is going to be to get those reward reimbursements and it’s especially crucial right now because January again, there’s some new rules and regulations revolving around it
Trevor Grant
Very good. Stephanie, anything to add into that.
Stephanie Smith
Yeah, those DAT reports are good. I say from a digital marketing standpoint, the ECM reports are my favourite. So the ECM1 breaks out your channel mix, but also you can see your source traffic to m.com and then also broken down by page visits so you can see which of your pages are performing better or worse. The ECM1 is definitely a go to so you can see also some breakdown against COMPSET and OTA production. But I also like the ECM3 report. The ECM3 report is where you can kind of drill down a little bit specifically, like social media referrals and also referring engines referring sites. So that basically means I know there’s some, Connor probably looks at some of the commissionable reports, but any website that sends traffic to your website that’s non commissionable shows up on that so like your CVB you can see production from that any type of like local demand generators that you might be able to get your hotel listed on. So I really like looking at to see, you know, from a backlink standpoint for actually getting traffic from some of our online partners.
Trevor Grant
That makes sense. And, again, as you said, at the beginning, you know, you guys support franchised operations, so obviously, when we’re, as we’re talking about Marriott, let’s look at those properties. From your own experience, are these obviously standard reports that are in the system, reports that people are probably aware of, are they utilised? The fact we’re talking about them maybe implies they’re not utilised as much or they’re not utilised as well as they could be? What’s your anecdotal stories around these reports, what do you see?
Connor Vanderholm
I think that we since we haven’t done this, this call or this, this interview in a year, I would have hoped that at this point, most of the systems had been cleaned up, you know, post pandemic, but obviously, we’re still having this conversation for reason, because they haven’t been and there’s still been a lot of neglect and a lot of cobwebs to knock off. And so I would say that, yes, the reports that I listed except for the MBV5, which is really important right now, guys, I don’t know if I could stress that enough, it’s very important. But other than that, the DAT reports and the SEG10 reports are kind of standard use for revenue managers.
Trevor Grant
And Stephanie, from your side,
Stephanie Smith
I think for for me the some of the data points you can pull. Like, this isn’t a real time system where you can go and look at data from yesterday, right? Some of the reports, like the ECM1, you can only get on a monthly basis, so you’re really waiting, you have to wait till the end of the month to be able to pull those numbers, which makes it hard some of the other ones you can pull much more real time, you know, with a, 48 hour latency, but the timing of things makes it a little bit more difficult and I think the other thing, some of those reports only go back 18 months, so as we go into 2022, I think a lot of hotels are using 2019 as benchmarks number, so it makes it really hard to bridge those gaps from an analysis standpoint, if you if you can’t go back in history that far.
Trevor Grant
Let’s go to our next acronym. Right? MBOP
Stephanie Smith
We like to think of it as the familiar Hanson song, you remember that?
Trevor Grant
Oh, yeah. You started that you can take this. So what is MBOP?
Stephanie Smith
So MBOP rolled out during the pandemic. So I’m sure a lot of hotels have used Brandworks before. and Brandworks still exists in some capacity more from a collateral, you know, collateral and design where you can get your hotels, logos, things like that, that the any individual hotel offers used to be housed in Brandworks now it’s moved over to MBOP. So it is nice that you can create landing pages, dedicated
Trevor Grant
What does it stand for? I think, is it the Marriott Bonvoy Offer Platform
Stephanie Smith
You can run non Bonvoy things in there, so like, when we work with our revenue management teams, like Connor, they’re gonna be creating the actual offer, providing us with the cluster code and then we’re building landing pages. So once revenue management loads that, you can see it in the sales strategy. But what we’re trying to do on the marketing side is promote that offer, so one get in on the actual offers landing page, so there’s a tile, and it’s called out, sometimes the offers and the sell strategy kind of get still a bit hard to find the packages if you don’t know where to look, necessarily – and then that also allows us to leverage that in our marketing campaign. So, for advertising offer on social media, and we land them on that landing page, it gives them more details about it, versus trying to force them to find it somewhere maybe hidden in the sales strategy. But they’re very, very specific, very specific cluster codes aligned with specific offers, I’m sure Connor can tell you, we find a redo a lot of our offers, because the revenue manager might never use the right cluster code. So you really have to understand the buckets in which cluster code go with what type of offer to make sure that it gets approved, and it goes live and it’d be okay.
Connor Vanderholm
Yeah, so from the revenue side, when we’re building these offers, you’re going to build them in HPP, which is high performance pricing, all revenue managers know what that is, and then if you’re grabbing a cluster code, I find the easiest way, I’m not sure I’ve ever done it elsewhere, but I go into Marsha and in order to look up a cluster code, you’re going to type: v, cc, tick, slash, and then write out the code, the first few letters of what the code name, or the, the offer name is. So that’s v, cc, apostrophe, slash in the first few letters of the actual rate code
Trevor Grant
V for Victor C for Charlie C for Charlie. Yep, yep,
Connor Vanderholm
and then tick or apostrophe and then slash, just standard slash. Yeah. and that’s Marsha is DOS based, and so it needs to be command based. A lot of revenue managers may have used Marsha before, that’s a very important command. So just write that one down real quick guys, to find those cluster codes – and then the cluster codes are really short,they’re usually three letters or, you know, however many maybe. Just on that same note, kind of in the same thing, even though we as revenue managers usually aren’t in the MBOP system, we do bebop a lot, but we don’t MBOP a lot, that’s just not our part of the cog in the system. We leave that to Cogwheel. We, I will say that there’s a couple of offers right now that I think are always good, and these are ongoing offers, the 2000 or the 2k points per day, 2000 points per day, and the 3000 points per day are great additional value adds that you can put on your website offers you can do. I was just looking at a hotel recently, they’re low on occupancy and having these offers where you can get an extra 2000 bonus points for nine bucks, or something, per day is a big deal and it’s a really good value grab especially because the loyalty program at Marriott. I mean, there’s a reason it’s the number one you know, so yeah, look at those ones.
Trevor Grant
Stephanie, you were going to say something that I think
Stephanie Smith
I was just gonna say when we talk about cluster codes and all that there’s some cluster codes, at least from a marketing standpoint where you can run exclusive campaigns, which means they don’t show up in the m.com Sales strategy, so if you’re ever looking around at mett campaign, METT campaign, you can look and turn on specific cluster code so that you can really check how well your campaigns doing because that knowing that that offer isn’t exclusive and ends and available through other channels. So sometimes it’s kind of hard to source where you get that production from. So leveraging specific cluster codes that are exclusive to specific channels, really helps you narrow down on your performance and KPIs.
Trevor Grant
Okay, MarRFP. Now I know RFP, so tell me MarRFP, obviously, Marriott RFP
Connor Vanderholm
It’s like if McDonald’s had RFPs it would be McRFP. Everything at Marriott has gonna start with an M. So MarRFP is important, especially as we’re doing interview checklists to make sure that everything’s in order. From a revenue manager standpoint, we ought to be going in at least right now you probably should have done it earlier in the year you should continually do it, but take the time now go through MarRFP go through the rooms and pricing screens and just check on one of your revenue calls here at the end of the year, some of our revenue calls are going to be a lot more interesting because they’re going to be different this time of year for the end of year stuff. But take the time and walk through the hotels, rooms and inventory descriptions go through and make sure that the TV sizes are updated the amount of beds is correct that the amount of people that asleep is updated. I’ve done quite a few of these recently. And oftentimes they think that they can sleep five in there and you’re like yeah, but you don’t have really the beds for that or sometimes you could actually sleep six because your sofa pullouts big enough and just update all that stuff make sure it’s good so that when it goes to the brand website and our OTA partners then it’s going to be all up to date and good and reflect well on the hotel that makes sense.
Stephanie Smith
And I just gotta say I’m impressed I don’t know many revenue managers that audit this in MarRFP usually that falls on us on the marketing side because I think there’s a miss you know, most people on the hotel side no MarRFP is the you know, more of a sales tool and they don’t really understand that there’s specific things that are related to your rooms that fall into EPIC then there’s a certain specific things that fall into MarRFP and both of those pull information into your rooms page on m.com, so if you are like, let’s say you have a suite and one suite has a pullout sofa in one doesn’t, MarRFP ia the one where you’re going to be really able to differentiate those room types. So we’ve worked with hotels that like have balconies, but they don’t show up in the room type name and things like that, that’s where you also want to look and be able to say, how do I differentiate my different room types in terms of rooms or size and things like that, and being able to portray that, in that, you know, being able to differentiate per room type on marriot.com.
Trevor Grant
MarRFP, I think you’ve almost answered that Connor, that people don’t typically maybe from a revenue perspective, utilise that quite as much as, as they should, if you’re having to do some of this auditing function and Stephanie, from your, from your side, what do you what do you see
Stephanie Smith
Yeah, I mean, it gets overlooked, because people just assume everything’s in EPIC, and again, a lot of this stuff is in EPIC, but I think there’s a lot of amenities that get missed. Like, if you’re on the GRE platform, which I think by most, at this point, everybody has that basically, that means you have the streaming Netflix through your TV service. So being able to put that on there, and the other, there’s a couple other and like Connor said, TV size is almost always wrong, square footage is almost always wrong, if it’s really detailed, you really have to go in there and see, okay, what am I missing that I can add? Because a lot of people just don’t edit the audit process.
Connor Vanderholm
If I can add to that as well, the systems are pretty legacy, let’s just put it that way and so they don’t do a lot of it yourself. If there’s a three there, it’s taken three. There’s a few of them recently, I did for an audit, they had listed that there was three balconies, or four balconies and I was like, how do you have four balconies in this room? They meant to put one but they didn’t know, and then below it says how many does it seat on the balcony and that was supposed to be three or four. So it just little things like that, that just need to be updated and constantly looked at because somebody at some point has screwed it up, I can promise you that. And just needs the cobwebs, dust it off.
Trevor Grant
And just back as well, as I didn’t ask you the same question about MBOP. Is that being used consistently regularly? Or is it still big gaps on that? Views on that side
Stephanie Smith
I think most revenue managers I work with, they build a campaign, they get into sales strategy, and they’re like, okay, you know, it’s done, I built the package. So I don’t know, I feel like from a marketing standpoint, that last leg of it of loading in MOP just usually doesn’t get done.
Connor Vanderholm
Yeah, I agree.
Trevor Grant
Next one we’ve got on the list is PLUS, What is it? Is it plus or is it P, L, U, S? Some acronym without an M at the front?
Connor Vanderholm
No, it’s actually Marriott PLUS.
Trevor Grant
Is this a marketing one is it?
Stephanie Smith
Yeah, so I’ll take this one. So PLUS, is the Marriott partnership with Koddi. Each brand has their own agreement with Koddi, each one of them have similar channels or, you know, you can build media plans and things like that each, but Marriot, specifically, you know, they were kind of the frontrunners in building out this platform, basically, so that you can manage a lot of your paid advertising in one place for your hotel. So you break it down into a category. So you have your direct channels, which looks like metasearch sponsor listings, then you have your OTAs which is Expedia travel ads, Priceline travel ads, and most recently booking.com native ads. Then you also have an SEM functionality through Google ads, and then also Facebook social media, at a high level we can say. So you have to really understand what goals you’re trying to achieve, work with your revenue management team, like Connor and Topline and say, where do we need help and what segments are we trying to go after. And then really strategically utilise the different channels that are in there because you’re not going to have enough budget to fund all of them at any one time. So you really have to be strategic about where you place your funds, how you set your beds. The nice thing about plus in the Koddi platform is there is some automation, so if you aren’t used to managing campaigns, if you’re at hotel level and it’s just not within your skill set or you have time constraints then there is an option to use that. You know use carefully obviously any optimization, you’re letting the system kind of take control of your of your budget now, you know being the control freak that I am I struggle releasing, I mean, I’m all about automation using AI, but we’re certainly working with smaller budgets, so we have to be a little bit more even more strategic than before about how those funds get loaded. They make it really, they make it really easy to run the platform. And there’s no budget minimums, like some of the other brands have some fairly hefty budget minimums to run some of these campaigns and most of these don’t have, most of the standard ones don’t have that.
Trevor Grant
That makes sense. So do you come across it at all Connor from your perspective?
Connor Vanderholm
Yeah, so it’s kind of weird. Depending on who does your revenue management, if you go through the brands, they’re not going to be touching your Marriott plus, or your travel ads, or any of those things, really, they kind of hands off, may have changed recently, since when I was there, but unlikely. If you’re with a management company, there’s likely that your revenue managers are doing this and they’re setting up a lot of the bids, and they’re setting up a lot of this stuff. So yeah, we do and then we look at the return on ad spend on it. So yes, there’s a lot of exposure for people who have experienced, but if you go through the brands know, what we love working with companies like Stephanie and her team over at Cogwheel, is that we don’t have to be experts on it. There’s lots of nuances between how, with how these ads are actually performing and then also on which platforms were spending that money. So having experts like her team is a huge benefit for us. We love it. Because we don’t have to be all things to everyone. Also just to say on the Marriott PLUS, we really like that as a revenue management management team. If a hotel is able to spend some money on that, because it’s going to drive direct contribution through brand.com and so you’re not paying commissions on it. And if we’re doing travel ads through Expedia, or we’re doing booking.com stuff, there’s a commission attached to it. There’s like we’re paying this money, and there’s a commission on top of it. It has its place. Absolutely. But we really like Marriott PLUS, because it’s going to be through your Google listings. Right? correct me if I’m wrong, Stephanie, but that’s my understanding.
Stephanie Smith
Some of them are, there is some OTA options in there. For the most part is driving revenue to marriott.com. Yes.
Trevor Grant
Listening to both of you, it sounds like a really good technology solution to get involved with, is it something that the franchisees have really understood, embraced, got totally engaged with, or is it again, like these other bits that we’ve been talking about? It’s still a little bit piecemeal, haphazard?
Stephanie Smith
I think Marriott has done a very good job about communicating the PLUS platform and educating, and if you are still unsure, they offer a lot of free training through Koddi, you can just email pm.support@koddi.com and ask them for upcoming. Almost every single brand no matter Marriott or not, they have some trainings that you can get on to kind of help educate yourself. I think it’s still it’s very hard unless you’re in the day to day, like if you’re an owner trying to understand am I supposed to be running meta, am I suppose to be running sponsored listings am I supposed to be, it’s very, um, I think unless you’re kind of using it day to day, it’s still I still get a lot of questions from owners and the higher level operators that don’t really understand. So I do think there’s an education component that goes along with it. But I also think the brand has done a really good job communicating, you know, putting your efforts there.
Connor Vanderholm
Yeah, I would just say, if we’re talking about franchisees that are owner operators, I see a lot of lack there. Whether that’s Marriott hasn’t trained them, or they haven’t embraced the training or whatever. Sounds like Stephanie says there’s a lot of training out there and a lot of a lot of push for it. But maybe they haven’t embraced because they don’t want to have to spend because they don’t know that there’s going to be a return. So they just haven’t done it before. We do encourage a lot of people that have never used it before. If it’s a management company, I think they have embraced it pretty well. They see that it’s a topic of discussion for the large corporations least that I’ve worked with. So that’s good. And then if you’re going to brand.com they’re going to encourage you to be doing that for sure whether the revenue managers are going to be super hands on or not.
Stephanie Smith
If you’re running on the metasearch sponsor placements then there’s no commission. I mean, obviously, if you’re running OTA ads. But you know, you have to look into so I’m sure we’ve talked about in previous shows my feelings about metasearch and making sure you as a hotel, making sure that you know, that’s the right platform for you, given your current circumstances. So, you know, before you start, the program is going to kind of default to put that money into metasearch, which isn’t always where I would first put the funds. So you just have to look at it on a case by case you know, with your revenue management team, understand your KPIs and your goals as a hotel and make sure you’re spending the right spots.
Trevor Grant
The final point, this one seems to lean in a little bit more to you Connor, inventory, now, this isn’t an acronym, but we’re just talking about inventory control dates here. What is the one?
Connor Vanderholm
Yeah, and often called ICDs, make sure you update them. The only point I’d make here is that you ought to be looking at these on a consistent basis. Basically, this is Marriott’s way of saying, hey, these are these are high demand dates that there’s a lot of business, like employee stays, for instance, that could dilute your ADR if it’s left on, right, if left open and available. And so, these inventory control dates, you can alter them or adjust them four times a year. So don’t be in there adjusting them consistently, like go through your entire year, find out when you know our special events and hot dates, and then go in and update your inventory control dates. It’s done in HPP (High Performance Pricing) and again, you’ve got 4 chances to do this and so make sure that those are constantly updated. Otherwise, you’ll find that, you know, you sold rooms that you shouldn’t have sold on a really high demand date.
Stephanie Smith
And hopefully 2022 has a lot of those high demand dates right.
Connor Vanderholm
You can adjust the four times but the amount of actual dates you get depends on the hotel.
Stephanie Smith
Connor, for things like your, you know, employee rates, you can set a cap on those at a rate code level too, right.
Connor Vanderholm
So we can’t cap employee stays, it’s capped at 50% occupancy, by room pool. For friends and family discounts, we can adjust what kind of a discount it is, you can put some alterations there. But the only way to really adjust its employees can come through is to artificially inflate demand in one yield. So the system thinks you’re, you know, it’s a really hot date
Stephanie Smith
to yield them out?
Connor Vanderholm
Yeah, which is something you actually can do. It’s kind of annoying in Marriott, but other brands, they take that completely out of your control.
