At the AHLA Foundation’s third annual No Room for Trafficking (NRFT) Summit in connection with World Day Against Trafficking in Persons, Marriott International, Inc. announced the pilot launch of HotelHelp, a rooms donation program for survivors of human trafficking. HotelHelp currently works with Marriott’s portfolio of hotels that are willing to donate short-term emergency stays and established care providers who book these rooms for the survivors they support.
HotelHelp is being piloted in five U.S. cities, including Atlanta, Detroit, Phoenix, Seattle, and Washington, D.C., and is expected to expand to 25 cities across North America by January 2025. Over the long term, the company plans to scale the program to additional locations globally, to other hotel companies, and to serve other vulnerable communities in need of short-term accommodation.
“Survivors of human trafficking often face a shortage of dedicated shelter beds that put them at greater risk of being re-trafficked after exiting their trafficking situation,” said Anthony Capuano, President and CEO of Marriott International. “As part of our longstanding anti-trafficking and survivor empowerment efforts, we are proud to have developed a solution to bridge the gap for safe, short-term accommodations for trafficking survivors and we look forward to working with other hotel companies to extend the reach of this effort.”
Modeled after the success of HospitalityHelps, an online booking platform established by HotelSwaps in collaboration with PKF International, and the Bench to provide short-term hotel stays for Ukrainian refugees, HotelHelp leverages a proven system to facilitate room donations for people in need. During the first three months of the war in Ukraine, HospitalityHelps booked over 100,000 room nights in 630 hotels – including over 8,700 room nights in 87 hotels within the Marriott portfolio throughout Europe. HotelSwaps continues to be a key partner in the ongoing development and operation of HotelHelp.
On the HotelHelp platform, participating care and service providers can reserve up to five room nights per person and make reservations on behalf of their clients to protect the confidentiality of the survivors they serve. Using a localized approach, HotelHelp introduces care and service providers and participating hotels to one another and encourages them to work together to navigate the nuances of each stay.
This initiative comes exactly one year after Marriott announced the national expansion of its Future in Training (FiT) Hospitality Survivor Employability Curriculum in partnership with the University of Maryland Support, Advocacy, Freedom, and Empowerment Center (the SAFE Center). The FiT Curriculum, designed to provide trauma-informed job readiness training for survivors interested in careers in hospitality, was deployed across the country by the SAFE Center with an inaugural grant from the AHLA Foundation No Room for Trafficking Survivor Fund. More than 160 survivors have been trained across 11 U.S. cities since July 2023. Marriott International and The J. Willard and Alice S. Marriott Foundation jointly contributed $550,000 to the fund last year to help increase access to opportunity through investments in organizations on the frontline of survivor support.
Marriott’s long history and deep commitment to advancing human rights is underpinned by its efforts to train all on-property associates in human trafficking awareness by 2025 as part of its sustainability and social impact platform, Serve 360. Since the training was introduced in 2016, over 1.3 million of the company’s managed and franchised associates have been trained to recognize and respond to potential human trafficking situations. Outside of Marriott, the training modules that Marriott has donated to the industry have been completed more than 1.6 million times through PACT. In addition, the enhanced version of Marriott’s human trafficking awareness training is now available through the World Sustainable Hospitality Alliance as the company works to make this important resource more accessible to hotel workers around the world.
