Can property scalpers no longer leech off Marriott?

Recently, some netizens found that after entering the corporate agreement codes of certain companies on Marriott's official website, the familiar low-rate rooms no longer pop up directly. Instead, users are required to fill in their work email addresses and complete authentication to continue booking at the corresponding negotiated rates.

The news quickly spread among the frequent traveler community. Some lamented that the days of rate scalpers are over, while others stayed up late to test every corporate code in their hands. According to the actual test results shared on social media so far, email verification has been implemented for ByteDance, while some codes for Tencent, Baidu, Alibaba and other companies are still available for normal query temporarily.

Up to now, Marriott has not publicly announced the implementation of work email verification for corporate negotiated rates on a global unified basis.

In April this year, Marriott's updated official rules still stated that corporate negotiated rates can only be used by employees of eligible companies, and guests are required to provide corporate identification or other proof of eligibility during check-in. Another rule updated in May also clearly stipulated that for guests who are not authorized to use the corporate code, the hotel may adjust the room rate to the Best Available Rate at the time of check-in.

Previously, some overseas Marriott members also discussed on the community that they had used corporate rates for more than ten years, and were only asked to prove their eligibility on very rare occasions.

However, hotel industry practitioners also mentioned that corporate rates booked directly through the official website are more likely to attract the attention of the front desk than orders entered through corporate travel platforms.

This is quite thought-provoking: are only users of corporate negotiated rates in Marriott Greater China subject to strict inspection?

As early as two years ago, when Hilton launched Hilton for Business, it had embedded work emails into the corporate travel system. Both business owners and employees must use emails with the same domain name as the company, free emails such as Gmail and Yahoo cannot pass the verification, and users need to receive a security code via their work email to complete verification after joining.

In contrast, Hyatt and InterContinental still retain more traditional corporate member verification paths. Taking Hyatt as an example, when Hyatt Leverage employees use corporate codes to make reservations, the hotel may request to present a business card, company ID or corporate credit card to prove the employment relationship at check-in.

After Marriott suddenly rolled out this strict new policy, two completely different management methods for hotel corporate rates have emerged. The newly added corporate email input box on the page seems to be just an extra step in the booking process, but it means that the long-existing mysterious negotiated hotel rates are gradually coming to the end of the era of access through secret codes.

01

Why did Marriott choose to tighten the access to corporate negotiated rates right before the National Day holiday?

The timing is easy to associate with special reasons. The National Day holiday is one of the nodes with the largest price fluctuations for hotels throughout the year. The public room rates in popular cities will rise sharply in a short period of time. If corporate negotiated rates still remain at a relatively low level, a significant price gap will quickly emerge between the two.

After all, the larger the price gap, the more valuable the agreement code is.

In the past few years, domestic hotel corporate negotiated rates have long evolved from a small secret in the travel and expense circle to an open business on social media. If you open a search engine and type in keywords like "Marriott corporate negotiated rate", it is not difficult to find a large number of strategies. Some people sort out the codes of different companies, and some websites have long maintained the Corporate Codes of hotel groups such as Marriott, Hilton, InterContinental and Hyatt, with even the enterprise names, applicable brands and usage methods listed clearly.

On platforms such as Xianyu and Xiaohongshu, a large number of booking agency services have also derived around negotiated rates. Some people charge a service fee of dozens of yuan to help guests place orders and sell the so-called big tech company negotiated rates, while other rate scalpers treat corporate codes as a long-term meal ticket, repeatedly exploiting the price difference between the public rate and the negotiated rate during peak seasons. The B2B rates that hotels spent time negotiating with corporate travel departments have gradually become coupons that anyone who knows the code can have the opportunity to use.

However, the business logic of corporate negotiated rates is built on real travel and expense demands. Large enterprises can continuously contribute stable room nights, and hotels are willing to sacrifice part of the price in exchange for relatively predictable business customer sources. The two sides will also renegotiate every year based on actual occupancy, urban demand and historical performance.

But when a large number of non-enterprise employees sneak in, they obviously take up the inventory that should have been sold to regular leisure guests.

This is also the reason why rate scalpers are particularly fond of holidays. On ordinary days, the public room rate is 600 yuan, and the negotiated rate is 500 yuan. It is only 100 yuan cheaper after a lot of effort, making the business hard to run. When the National Day comes, the public rate for the same room rises to 1,200 yuan, and if the negotiated rate still stays around 700 yuan, the code instantly becomes extremely valuable.

The overflow of negotiated rates is the biggest headache for hotel front desks. At 11 p.m., guests drag their luggage to the hotel, the order already exists in the system, but the front desk finds that the guest booked the negotiated rate of a certain Internet company. The front desk asks to see the employee ID, but the guest says the company has long canceled physical IDs. When asked to show a business card, many companies no longer issue them these days. With a price difference of hundreds of yuan, there are still complaining guests queuing up behind.

Most front desk staff do not want to cause unnecessary trouble. In this day and age, front desk work is not easy, and no one wants to have disputes with guests. Usually they turn a blind eye, and the hotel owners end up bearing the losses caused by the price loophole.

Now that Marriott has moved email verification to the booking page, behind this simple and crude measure, there is less explanation cost when guests arrive at the hotel, which also brings benefits to enterprises.

Because if the number of users of corporate negotiated rates remains distorted for a long time, it will be difficult for hotels to judge how many real employees are staying. The more widely the code is spread, the easier it is for the value of the welfare that originally belongs to corporate employees to be diluted.

Therefore, the sudden corporate email verification launched by Marriott before the National Day is not just aimed at preventing rate scalpers, but essentially to repair the long-running price order among enterprises, hotels and the group.

02

A while ago, I came across the book *Power Pricing* written by pricing master Hermann Simon, which puts forward a very interesting point of view.

If an enterprise wants to sell the same product to different consumers at different prices, it needs to find a way to build a fence between groups with high willingness to pay and those with low willingness to pay. The hotel industry later referred to a similar mechanism as Rate Fence, which roughly means a price barrier.

For example, booking 30 days in advance can get a lower rate, only members can see member rates, government employees need to prove their identity, and corporate negotiated rates require users to be employees of the contracted company. It is the same room, the only difference is who is qualified to cross the fence.

Seeing this, I suddenly felt that Marriott's recent implementation of corporate email verification is essentially doing exactly the same thing. In the past two decades, the price fence that hotels have worked hard to build has been dug with more and more small holes by the Internet.

The corporate agreement code is the most typical one among these loopholes. From this perspective, corporate email verification may just be the beginning.

In fact, in the mature corporate travel system, identity verification is not a new thing. When many large enterprise employees book hotels through travel platforms such as Concur, after logging into their corporate accounts, the system can already identify their corporate identity and display the pre-negotiated hotel rates.

Employees do not even need to know what the string of Corporate Code behind it is. Marriott itself has also adopted a similar idea in Business Access by Marriott Bonvoy: corporate administrators invite employees to join, and after the personal account is associated with the corporate account, eligible employees can enter the corresponding corporate travel booking system.

What is truly still stuck in the old era is a large number of corporate negotiated rates that are booked by directly entering the Corporate Code on the hotel's official website.

Therefore, the noteworthy move made by Marriott and other hotel groups recently is that they finally started to try to move the wall that has long existed in corporate travel platforms to the official website booking entrance that ordinary consumers can also access. At that time, the negotiated rate will be more like an invisible permission in the member account.

Of course, technology will not solve all problems, and rate scalpers will probably not disappear completely as a result. But if they want to continue their gray business in the future, the cost will only get higher and higher.

Those simple business models that rely on publicly collecting Corporate Codes and adding a service fee of dozens of yuan will probably lose their living space first.

From the era of free access via codes in the early years, to occasional employee ID checks at the front desk, to direct work email verification during booking, hotels are rebuilding the price fence that was dismantled by the Internet.

One day when the Corporate Code really disappears from the booking page, people may realize that the mysterious hotel secret codes that used to circulate everywhere in frequent traveler forums have quietly completed their historical mission.

In the future, knowing the secret code will no longer help you get a lower room rate, the system has to recognize you first.

This article is from the WeChat Official Account "Travel Daily", written by theodore Xishao, and published with authorization by 36Kr.