In an effort to provide meeting planners with a single point of contact when working with New Orleans-based Marriott hotels, Marriott International has rolled out a new Group Market Sales Organization.
The new entity was launched Jan. 1 to ease communication between meeting planners and hotels in New Orleans, and to increase Marriott’s outreach in target market segments.
Lead by Kristen McMillon-Rauch as its director of sales, the organization is comprised of 13 Marriott and Renaissance hotels in New Orleans, totaling nearly 4,000 hotel rooms.
“The primary purpose of what we did was to make the booking process easier for our customers, and to have a one-contact solution for them when they want to book their meetings in a New Orleans Marriott or Renaissance,” McMillon-Rauch said. “It’s not necessarily a test market for Marriott, it’s something our [New Orleans] customers were requesting—one point of contact.”
McMillon-Rauch said the push for a centralized sales effort for the chain’s New Orleans properties actually began before Hurricane Katrina, and that the move will free up additional salespeople to target markets that are not traditional for New Orleans.
“We actually have a staff of 45 salespeople, broken up by deployment, and each handles a specific market,” she said. “We still have property salespeople—for example, the New Orleans Marriott has a dedicated sales team. We haven’t eliminated property sales; they’re just more focused to find business that’s perfect for the hotel they’re representing. The process for [meeting planners] hasn’t really changed. For a particular hotel, they would still contact that hotel. They don’t necessarily have to search us out.”
McMillon-Rauch said that business for Marriott is on the upswing in the Crescent City.
“Surprisingly, we have a lot of our hotels back to pre-Katrina demand, which is surprising,” she said. “In the last couple of weeks we’ve had a lot of days where all of the hotels were at full capacity, which is very surprising. It’s great to see the city coming back. There are a lot of positive things happening.”
