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In terms of marketing innovations, virtual reality technologies open new gates for consumer
experiences. Indeed, a virtual reality tour can walk potential guests through your hotel,
showcasing your suites, spa, restaurants, pool, and other areas that attract customers. For
event planners, a virtual reality tour can place them directly in your event spaces, allowing
them to see the possibilities for their function, whether it's a business conference or a
wedding. As travelers plan their trips or event planners select their locations, virtual reality
could help potential customers see themselves in your hotel. Marriott has led the way in
virtual reality through its tech-driven Travel Brilliantly campaign. Last year Marriott
launched an eight-city virtual reality tour with its Teleporter, first-ever immersive 4-D virtual
reality travel experience (GetTeleported– The Most Immersive 4-D Virtual Travel Experience
Arrives, Taking Guests to Parts Known and Unknown as Marriott Hotels Imagines the Future
of Travel with Oculus Rift Technology, 2014). The Teleporter offered users a virtual reality
tour of a Hawaiian beach and a London skyscraper. Marriott has taken its virtual reality
tours further with "VRoom Service" at several locations. With the service, hotel guests can
have virtual reality headsets sent to their room and view "VR Postcards" (Marriott Hotels
Introduces The First Ever In-Room Virtual Reality Travel Experience, 2015). VR Postcards are
immersive travel stories that users experience in 360 3D via a virtual reality headset. Each
story follows a real traveler on a journey to a unique destination as viewers are immersed in
the destination and hear the travelers’ personal stories about why travel is important to
them.
Organizational innovation: promoting participatory innovation
Organizational innovation refers to the implementation of a new organizational method in
the firm’s business practices, workplace organization or external relations. Organizational
innovations can be intended to increase a firm’s performance by reducing administrative
costs or transaction costs, improving workplace satisfaction (and thus labor productivity),
gaining access to non-tradable assets or reducing costs of supplies (OECD, 2005). In other
words, organizational innovation considers the introduction of new organizational methods
within the firm so as to improve its operational practices, aimed at renewing the
organizational routines, procedures, mechanisms, or systems, and promoting teamwork,
information sharing, coordination, cooperation, collaboration, learning and innovativeness
(Gunday et al., 2011).
In this respect, Marriott has introduced an innovation that promotes open, participatory
organizational innovation – the Innovation Lab, located beneath the company’s
headquarters in Maryland. It is a floor-to-ceiling white space that offers a clean slate for
anyone – whether employee, customer, designer, researcher or architect – to manipulate
and make his mark. Upon entry to the Innovation Lab, guests enter a gallery filled with
projected images on walls that introduce presentations of Marriott’s newest designs.
Visitors to the space become a part of the design and testing process for guestrooms, great
room lobbies, meetings spaces, food & beverage concepts, etc. Their feedback and
participatory contribution creates an ever-changing lab for constant innovation,
experiencing ideas and exploring new concepts for further implementation and future
projection (Designs on the Future – Big Ideas Become Reality at Marriott Hotels' New
“Underground” Innovation Lab, 2013).
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