Marriott to expand further into home-sharing

MARRIOTT IS pushing more heavily into home-sharing, confident that its combination of luxury properties and loyalty points can lure travellers away from rivals like Airbnb. The world’s biggest hotel company will soon start taking reservations through its website for 2,000 homes in 100 markets in the United States, Europe and Latin America. It plans to expand its Homes and Villas programme to other locations.

For its part, Airbnb is encroaching further into hotels. On Monday, the San Francisco-based company said it’s working with a New York real estate developer to establish a hotel with 200 suites in Rockefeller Plaza in Manhattan. Airbnb, which plans to go public but hasn’t made clear when, also acquired Hotel Tonight, a last-minute booking service, in March.

Marriott is targeting families and groups, and the homes skewed towards luxury, with prices ranging from US$200 per night for a one-bedroom apartment to US$10,000 for a full Scottish castle. Nearly 40 of the markets are in places where Marriott doesn’t currently have hotels, like Bar Harbor, Maine, and Bordeaux, France.

SOME WAY TO GO

Marriott is a long way from matching home-sharing behemoths like Airbnb, which boasts six million listings worldwide, or Booking.com, which has listings in 220 countries. The homes in its programme aren’t even exclusive Marriott properties. Marriott is partnering with rental management companies to handle the maintenance and cleaning.

But Marriott believes it has advantages. Unlike its home-sharing rivals, it has a loyalty programme that lets travellers earn and use points on its hotels and homes. Business travellers can accumulate points at Courtyard hotels, for example, and use them for a week at a beach house. Airbnb is working on a loyalty programme of its own, but the rollout has been delayed.

Marriott says it also guarantees hotel-like standards that are often missing in home-sharing, such as Wi-Fi, crisp white sheets, bath amenities, cribs and smoke alarms. Airbnb has tried to tackle that problem with user reviews and its Plus programme, which highlights rentals that meet higher quality standards. But the sheer volume of properties makes it difficult to police them all.

Marriott began testing home-sharing with 200 homes in London last year, and later expanded it to several other cities in Europe. The company found that most of its home-sharing guests were leisure travellers and they stayed an average of 5.1 nights, or double the length of a traditional hotel stay.

Marriott’s research also showed that 30% of its customers had stayed in a shared home in the last year.

“When they were doing that, they weren’t staying at an offering from us,” Linnartz told The Associated Press. “This is a gap we want to close.”

‘ Unlike its home-sharing rivals, it has a loyalty programme that lets travellers earn and use points on its hotels and homes’