U.S. Travel: Travel Blitz-Marriott
The following video appeared on U.S. Travel's website on October 2, 2013. A link to the video can be found here and the transcript is below.
Travel Blitz-Marriott from U.S. Travel on Vimeo.
During the August congressional recess, Marriott hosted several events with lawmakers and championed travel in the media.
Debbie Marriott Harrison: We have a great relationship with Senator Ayotte and her office and she reached out to U.S. travel and she wanted to do a back of the house tour
Thomas Maloney: We have a really fantastic property in New Hampshire on the sea coast. It's an old historic hotel called the Wentworth by the Sea.
Marriott Harrison: It was a great opportunity to show her the economic impact that our hotels, our business has on the local community. And then we also thanked her, we took the opportunity to thank her for her support on the comprehensive immigration reform bill.
Maloney: Congressman Quigley, he does a series called the undercover congressman, and he wanted to do an undercover day at one of our hotels in suburban Chicago. At one point he was changing some beds with the housekeepers and he found out that he was not quite up to par and we were ready to give him a little more training.
Marriott Harrison: It was a great day and he had a lot of fun and he learned a lot about our business. And again it goes back to the point where they are learning to appreciate our business, learning to appreciate our associates, learning to appreciate the opportunities that we create and the economic impact that we have where our hotels are.
Maloney: Well our top priorities here has clearly been passage of the immigration reform bill and US travel was really instrumental in making sure that a lot of pro travel measures were in that packet. We were trying to get the message out there through a lot of media channels. It started off in the beginning of the summer with our boss, Kathleen Matthews, testing before a Congressional committee in the House on power of travel to the economy. We publish in traditional print media of op-eds and we also took to social media this summer. We asked every general manager of a full service property to email there congressman to say that passage of the immigration reform bill is critical.
