By: @ChristineBirkne
In an increasingly competitive landscape, Marriott has added to its loyalty program by offering something that home-sharing services can’t: the opportunity to book a camel ride in the desert or a helicopter ride over the Grand Canyon with your hotel stay.
Today, Marriott announced an investment in PlacePass, a site that lets you search for and compare prices for global travel experiences. Through PlacePass, Marriott customers can now choose from 100,000 local experiences in 800 destinations, like wrestling with a retired sumo wrestler in Tokyo, touring the castle where Downton Abbey was filmed, or riding camels in the desert outside of Dubai, when they book their hotel.
This adds to the music, sports and culinary experiences guests can already redeem for points through Marriott’s current loyalty program, which has 100 million members. Guests will have to buy the experiences on PlacePass outright for the time being, but Marriott hopes to build a program so people can eventually trade loyalty points for these experiences.
