Personalized Learning at Global Scale: How Marriott International Earned a 2026 Novie Award for Enterprise-Wide Excellence

Key Takeaways:

• Marriott International has won a 2026 Novie Award for Transformation at Scale, NovoEd’s recognition for enterprise-wide initiatives that drive large-scale change across regions, functions, or roles
• The award celebrates Marriott’s Executive Excellence program, which reimagined how new-to-Marriott franchise management companies are trained to operate Marriott hotels
• By replacing static, slide-based training with a dynamic, customizable learning experience, Marriott dramatically reduced content management time while increasing personalization
• Reusable course templates now allow Marriott’s team to clone and customize a primary course quickly, delivering tailored learning experiences without the manual overhead that once slowed them down

How do you deliver personalized, engaging learning experiences while supporting enterprise partners at global scale? That’s the challenge Marriott International’s Executive Excellence team set out to solve, and their answer earned them a 2026 Novie Award for Transformation at Scale.

We’re proud to celebrate this recognition alongside Marriott International because it captures exactly what the Novie Awards are meant to honor: enterprise-wide initiatives that drive meaningful, large-scale change across regions, functions, and roles.

Who Makes Up Marriott International’s Global Footprint?

Marriott International is one of the world’s largest and most recognized hospitality companies, with a portfolio spanning dozens of hotel brands across nearly every corner of the globe. Much of Marriott’s global footprint is made possible through franchise partnerships, meaning that a significant share of the guest experience at any given Marriott property is delivered not by Marriott corporate employees, but by franchise management companies operating under the Marriott name.

That reality makes onboarding and training an enormous strategic priority. When a new franchise management company joins the Marriott system, that organization needs to quickly and thoroughly understand how to run a Marriott hotel to the company’s exacting standards, from guest experience to operational accountability. The team responsible for this critical work sits within Marriott’s Owner and Franchise Services organization and goes by a fitting name: Executive Excellence. Christina Taylor, Senior Director of Executive Excellence, leads much of this work and accepted the Novie Award on the team’s behalf.

Modernizing Franchise Onboarding

For years, training new-to-Marriott franchise management companies meant relying on static, slide-based content, the kind of training format that’s familiar to just about every L&D professional, but one that comes with real limitations. Slide decks are difficult to update quickly, cumbersome to customize for different audiences, and often fail to create the kind of engaging, intuitive experience that helps new learners retain critical operational knowledge.

In Marriott’s Novie Award announcement shared on NovoEd’s YouTube channel, Taylor describes making a deliberate shift away from that legacy approach. By embracing NovoEd’s platform, her team built a far more dynamic way to deliver content, one that could be updated quickly, customized easily, and scaled in ways that simply weren’t possible under the old model.

The impact on the learner experience has been significant. According to Taylor, franchise management company learners now describe the training as intuitive, a meaningful shift from a static, content-heavy format to one that feels modern and responsive to their needs.

Scaling Personalization Through Reusable Templates

Perhaps the most powerful part of Marriott’s transformation is how it solved the tension between personalization and scale. Historically, delivering a truly customized learning experience for each new franchise management company would have required an enormous amount of manual content management, a burden most L&D teams simply can’t absorb at enterprise scale.

Marriott’s solution centers on a primary, go-to course that serves as the foundation for every new engagement. From there, Taylor’s team can clone that primary course and further customize it for the specific needs of each franchise partner. This clone-and-customize approach has fundamentally changed the team’s relationship with content. Instead of spending the bulk of their time managing and rebuilding materials from scratch, they now have the time and platform capabilities to focus on true personalization, tailoring each learning experience to the specific franchise management company it serves.

The result, as Taylor describes it, is much less time spent managing content and much more time spent on delivery, which is ultimately where the value lies for everyone involved: the Executive Excellence team, the franchise management companies, and, most importantly, the guests who experience Marriott’s brand standards at properties around the world.

Why This Recognition Matters

The Transformation at Scale Novie Award exists to recognize exactly this kind of enterprise-wide impact: initiatives that don’t just improve a single course or team, but that fundamentally change how an organization operates across regions and franchise relationships. Marriott International’s Executive Excellence program is a compelling example of what’s possible when a learning team rethinks its entire approach to content delivery, rather than simply digitizing an old process.

For L&D leaders managing large, distributed audiences of their own, whether that’s franchise partners, global business units, or extended enterprise learners, Marriott’s story offers a clear playbook. Building a strong, reusable foundational course and pairing it with the ability to clone and customize can unlock a level of personalization at scale that would be nearly impossible to achieve through manual content creation alone. The time saved on content management can then be reinvested directly into the quality and relevance of what learners actually experience.

There’s also an important lesson here about learner experience. Moving beyond a static, slide-based format wasn’t just an operational upgrade for Marriott, it directly improved how learners perceive and engage with training. When new franchise partners describe an onboarding experience as intuitive, that’s a strong signal that the learning experience is doing its job: preparing people to succeed from day one.

Congratulations to Marriott International

We want to extend our sincere congratulations to Christina Taylor and the entire Marriott International Executive Excellence team on this well-earned 2026 Novie Award. Their work transforming franchise onboarding into a dynamic, scalable, and deeply personalized learning experience reflects exactly the kind of large-scale, enterprise-wide impact the Transformation at Scale award was created to recognize.

If you’d like to hear directly from Taylor about her team’s experience partnering with NovoEd, you can watch the full customer story on our YouTube channel.

See What NovoEd Can Do for Your Organization

Marriott’s story shows what’s possible when scalable course design meets true personalization. Whether you’re onboarding franchise partners, training extended enterprise audiences, or managing learning content across dozens of regions and teams, NovoEd’s platform is built to help you reduce the burden of content management so your team can focus on what matters most: delivering impactful learning experiences.

Want to learn how NovoEd can help your organization build its own award-winning talent development program? Request a demo today and discover how we can help you turn your learning strategy into measurable impact.