User Research for Marriott.com

Challenge

Marriott waned to learn more about how users book a hotel room online. The company was also interested in learning more about how to expand their loyalty rewards program, luxury hotel offerings and travel packages.

Approach

The project focused on three methods: nano usability study, survey and user interviews.

Three participants with varying travel experience were asked one-on-one to walk through how they find and book a hotel online for a hypothetical trip. They were not prompted or asked any questions while they worked through the task. 

The survey consisted of close-ended questions related to the user’s hotel booking behavior. The purpose of the survey was to understand what the user expects throughout the hotel booking process. 

Following the survey, I conducted three in-person interviews for 30 minutes each. I was asking questions about their experiences traveling, booking hotels and usage of loyalty programs. Some of my findings included:

• After a user identifies the date, location, budget and number of people for their trip, they visit a hotel aggregate website like TripAdvisor, hotels.com or expedia.com. They visit these sites to directly compare prices and read through reviews. 

• After making their hotel selection based on the best price and reviews, some users will book directly on the hotel aggregate website and others will visit the actual hotel website. 

• Users explained that they always use a laptop to book a hotel. Given the extensive research the users do to compare between prices and reviews, they need to be able to flip between tabs quickly and easily.

• The users that frequently used hotel loyalty rewards programs traveled regularly for work. The rewards program motivated them more because the freebies were truly ‘free’ for them. 

Final Product

I created a research report with my findings and recommendations to help Marriott reach their business goals by aligning with user behaviors.