Marriott’s Website Named Fastest in Industry by USA Today Study

Top-Ten Consumer Website Ranked #1 in Performance.

When booking a hotel room online, marriott.com users are experiencing the best the Internet has to offer. According to a recent USA Today-commissioned study, Marriott International (NYSE: MAR) beat all others as the fastest and best performing lodging website.

By winning the top spot, marriott.com (http://www.marriott.com) earned the Gold Award for “Best of the Web.” This designation came from USA Today’s partner in the study, Compuware. The study’s metrics included speed, navigation and room details. Extensive testing found that marriott.com loads quicker than two seconds. Other hotel websites were sluggish, some taking up to eight seconds to load.

For our guests, booking a room online is the beginning of their hotel experience and this study validates our own customer surveys. Our guests give marriott.com high marks.

“We design our websites to please our guests, who are looking for speed, rich content, features and ease of use,” said Shafiq Khan, Senior VP e-commerce, Marriott International. “Delivering on all of these simultaneously is a difficult balancing act, made even more challenging by the fact that we have practically re-invented our website in the last 18 months.”

“Marriott’s commendable site performance is proof that it puts its customers’ online experiences front and center,” said Bruce Reading, Senior Vice President, Compuware.

Marriott.com has more than 12 million visits monthly and growing. It is among the top ten consumer retail sites in the world in revenue. Through its main website, users can access home pages for more than 3600 hotels globally. Marriott’s multilingual websites are supported by services and technology from www.translations.com.

Compuware, a technology performance company, tested 47 hotel booking sites using its “Gomez platform.” Click here to read the study methodology: http://bit.ly/jaIqSE

Visit Marriott International, Inc. (NYSE: MAR) for company information. For more information or reservations, please visit our web site at www.marriott.com , and for the latest company news, visit www.marriottnewscenter.com.

COMPUWARE
For nearly 40 years, Compuware has lead the way on solutions for application performance management, business portfolio management and mainframe solutions. It’s “Gomez” benchmarks are the industry leader in comparing websites. Compuware makes the world’s most important technologies perform at their best. When technology performance really matters — and it matters now more than ever — organizations, including 46 of the top 50 Fortune 500 companies and 12 of the 20 most visited U.S. web sites, turn to Compuware.