Marriott International has pledged that despite the growth of its Internet sales, it does not intend to encourage Web bookings at the expense of agents.
Currently bookings on-line account for just under 1% of total sales. But the company says it believes customers who used this method would have been more likely to book direct anyway.
Vice-president intermediary sales and marketing Fred Miller, who spearheads travel agency relations, said: “Agents are the ones that are giving us the bucks after all.
“Unlike other hotel companies, we do not do special offers on the Internet and we will not encourage people to swap ways of booking. Our projections through to 2002 are that travel agency business will increase faster than our sales volume on the Internet.
“We look at marriott.com as another distribution channel but we will always focus on agents.”