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Marriott hotel guests will now be able to log into their home Netflix accounts while staying in select Marriott properties so they can take their home entertainment on the road at no extra charge.
The new partnership means that some 62 million Netflix members will be able to use the Netflix subscriptions they already pay for at home to get free in-room entertainment when they stay at Marriott hotels, according to the companies. The service will be available to hotel guests through a Netflix app on Internet-connected television systems in their rooms.
So far, the Netflix service is only available in six Marriott hotels across the United States, with service coming to six additional properties by the end of the summer, according to Marriott.
The hotels that have the service now are the New York Marriott East Side, the San Jose Marriott, the Princeton Marriott, the Newport Marriott, the Dallas/Fort Worth Marriott Solana and the Bethesda Marriott Suites. The six hotels that will get the service this summer are the Marriott Marquis in Washington, D.C., the San Francisco Marriott Marquis, the Atlanta Marriott Marquis, the Dayton Marriott, the San Juan Marriott Resort & Stellaris Casino and the Anaheim Marriott.
“Our collaboration with Netflix responds to changing consumer preferences in the way our guests access and watch content, while recognizing the leading role Netflix is playing in driving this transformation,” Matthew Carroll, vice president of brand management for Marriott Hotels, said in a statement. “Because consumers are choosing to take their streaming content with them when they travel, Marriott Hotels is making the industry’s first rollout of Netflix a priority.”
The arrangement means that hotel guests won’t have to watch their favorite shows on Netflix using their tablets, laptop computers and other small-screen mobile devices such as smartphones. That means that guests will now be able to tune in to their Netflix home subscriptions to be able to watch shows such as Orange is the New Black, House of Cards, Marvel’s Daredevil and more.
Under the deal, Netflix capabilities will be expanded to 100 Marriott properties by the end of 2015 and to nearly all of its 300 properties in the United States by the end of 2016, according to Marriott.
Under the program, guests will only have to log in to their Netflix accounts once throughout their stay, and when they check out of the hotel, all of their account information will be automatically wiped clean from the televisions in the rooms, according to Marriott.
“Our members tell us they want to watch Netflix any time, in any place where they have an Internet connection,” Bill Holmes, global head of business development for Netflix, said in a statement. “Through our partnership with Marriott, they’ll get to watch their favorite movies, TV shows and Netflix originals on big screens just like they do at home.”
The Netflix services are also available in more than two-dozen U.S. hotels representing other Marriott International brands so far and will also be expanded to additional Marriott brands in the future.
In October 2014, Marriott International was slapped with a $600,000 fine after it illegally deactivated or blocked WiFi signals from private equipment at a Nashville hotel. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) levied the fine after the hotel chain admitted that some of its employees in a Nashville hotel illegally blocked private WiFi signals and customer hotspots so that guests and conference attendees would have to pay to use the hotel’s WiFi services.
The incident occurred in March 2013 at the Gaylord Opryland Hotel and Convention Center in Nashville, Tenn., according to the FCC, when an attendee at a conference being held in the facility found that a mobile hotspot wasn’t accessible for use because it had been disabled by the hotel’s workers. Marriott had charged conference exhibitors and other attendees anywhere from $250 to $1,000 per device to use the Gaylord WiFi service in the conference facilities, according to an earlier eWEEK report.
In January 2015, Marriott dropped a petition for rule making that would have allowed the hotel chain to block personal WiFi hotspots in conference and meeting facilities in the future.