This post is about major hotel chains and how they are using RSS feeds to deliver deals, and hotel related content.

I began preparing for this post by browsing some of the major hotel web sites to see how they were using RSS feeds to deliver information such as Hotel Deals, Special Rates, Vacation Packages, Last-Minute Offers, and other stuff that I just assumed a major hotel web site would naturally be offering via RSS. The results were surprising and not necessarily what I expected.

The first site I checked was Marriott. There was an RSS link at the bottom of the page so I was off to a good start, or so I thought. It looked like the last feature that had been added to the web site. That’s okay since RSS for many is still fairly new. I probably would not have found the RSS link if I was not specifically looking for it. (When I hit a home page I typically do a control+f for “RSS” to locate the links quickly) I am using Firefox version 1 .5 with Google toolbar for those that are interested.

I noticed a lack of uniformity on the Marriott.com web site in relationship to their one RSS feed. Clicking the “subscribe to contents of this page” on the Google toolbar I saw the heading “Marriott International (Official Site) - eBreaks” along with this description… “Last-minute weekend rates that are at least 20% off at Marriott hotels in the US, Canada, the Caribbean and Latin America.”

Great, I am looking for weekend rates that are 20% off or more (a perfect use for RSS feeds). But something is not right about the hyperlink. It reads… http://marriott.digitalimpact.com/ebreaks and clicking on it brings up a FeedBurner account page that has no information for any deals, just more subscribe links, and links for Feedburner. Nothing against Feedburner, I have an account there myself, I just expected to see some content other than the Feedburner user template.

***Update*** As a rep from Feedburner pointed out, “Marriott has actually decided not to show feed content on both of those pages and to just display the subscribe links. This is an option in the FeedBurner BrowserFriendly settings that any publisher can choose to use.” - see comments for complete details.

With all the traffic I see here for RSS codes and coupons I have to imagine people are visiting hotels like Marriott.com looking for offers and deals through RSS feeds.

If we don’t use the Google toolbar and we just click on the “RSS” link at the bottom of the Marriott page, we get a link to… http://blog.digitalimpact.com/marriott/ebreaksrss.html which you’ll notice is not a Marriott.com page at all. It’s a page located on a blog subdomain of a marketing company. Still, there’s a PR 8 on my Google page rank screen. Clicking on that, we see that Marriott is offering a “limited time” test program for getting Marriott deals via RSS feeds. (Hello Marriott, it’s time to stop testing and start doing, RSS feeds are growing fast and you’re missing some major opportunities if you don’t jump in soon.)

The landing page has all the vanilla RSS stuff, links to subscribe via Yahoo, MSN, bloglines, AOL, and newsgator (no Google). I also find what I’m looking for, the XML logo. At least I thought I found what I was looking for, clicking on the XML logo brings up the http://marriott.digitalimpact.com/ebreaks feed burner page with no recent posts.

Fortunately, the Marriott eBreaks XML works. Here are two versions of KickRSS feeds I located… User: marriott hotels (RSS) When Marriott develops a more permanent solution I’ll post some information here.

Marriott has some work to do but we did discover RSS feeds on the Marriott homepage and that’s what we were seeking. Next will be looking at Hilton, Radisson, Sheraton, Best Western, Hyatt, Four Seasons, Ritz-Carlton, and how they present their RSS feeds. Stay Tuned!