I find that there's a lot of power in the voice of the customer. Customer informs everything. It's our number one reason for being. The responsibility that goes with that can't be understated. The digital age represents the death of business as usual. If you're not disrupting yourself, you are going to be disrupted. The question is how? How do businesses actually transform? This series is about decoding the digital DNA of some of the world's leading businesses that are doing just that. Publicis Sapient has been digitally transforming our clients' businesses for more than 30 years. We've partnered with clients across all industries and helped them stay relevant in the digital age through the launch of the first online banks, travel portals, stock creating platforms, and retail commerce platforms. In this episode, we'll talk to three of our clients. Each are from completely different industries that face vastly different outlooks, but all three have recognized that we've entered the age of the customer. In order to be competitive in a digital world, businesses must obsess over how customers interact with them. Travel and hospitality is one industry where the customer has always been at the center, but digital has required even the most storied brands to shift how they understand the notion of experience. It's no longer just about understanding your customers, it's about anticipating and meeting their needs.
Marriott International began as a nine-stool root beer stand right here in Washington, D.C. in 1927. Then Marriott got into the hotel business in 1957. We were born with this mission and spirit to serve customers as they traveled around the world, and so we have to be in front of all the trends. One of the things that we had noticed within our company was that we were seeing an increasing number of our guests leave our portfolio to rent vacation rental homes. And so we started to think about what are ways that we could solve this need that our guests have. We talked to our Marriott Bonvoy members. We knew that they were renting homes from the big players that were out there. And we said we want those customers, our customers, to stay in our ecosystem. So we've worked with tremendous partners like Publicis Sapient. We launched a new customer experience offering, Homes and Villas by Marriott International. And so we built a different business model for the industry. It wasn't a purely open platform where anybody could list their homes. Instead, we worked with professional property managers, and we said we're going to curate the best homes. We tested it. We learned. We iterated. We started that business with 2,000 homes in 2019 and doubled down and invested throughout the pandemic and are close to 50,000 homes right now. You know, I often think about Homes and Villas as the disruption to the disruptor.
Another fundamental shift is the recognition that the world above the glass and the world below the glass of the digital world and the physical world are inextricably linked. When we say end-to-end experience design, we're talking about every step in that customer journey on an end-to-end basis, which requires companies to rethink how they're organized in order to fulfill that customer journey for the customer.
UPS started in the year 1906 in Seattle, Washington, and it really started as a messenger company. And now you look at us, we are in 220 countries and territories. We were asked a pivotal question by our leadership. We were given the goal, so we want to have the best digital experience. A whole revamp of our UPS.com website. Let me just give you a sense on the importance of that. We have a billion unique users every year. A billion. So it gets a lot of traffic. So we ran off and started to say, okay, let's go and build. What do we need to do? And we came back with a presentation, and then somebody said, well, hold on a minute. What is the best digital experience? What defines it? That's a good question. We actually can summarize it in two words. Simple and useful. We think about the consumer's role in the digital transformation. They have emerged as a critical part of the equation. Our shared vision with our partners is all around, really, our digital transformation. And that's a joint vision, and a reason why we partner so well with Publicis Sapient. Publicis Sapient really brings a combination of agile, technical, capable resources to UPS to allow us to innovate and get things done.
If change is moving faster outside the company than it is inside the company, then you're probably on your way to being obsolete. Digital used to be viewed as a channel that was tangential to a company's core business. In recent years, it's moved from tangential to existential, to how companies not only operate, but how they create value for their customers. The thing that set off the digital transformation really is the advent of the smartphone. When Steve Jobs stood on that stage at the Moscone Center and announced this brand new device, that was really the moment where Verizon's traditional business took off. We started to think about how we could use that device to interact with our customers. We're designing systems that allow companies to have conversations with customers at scale. Design is not a visual skinning exercise to just, you know, apply fonts and colors, but it is the backbone of experiences that, you know, proliferate in the world of how Verizon speaks to customers. One of the challenges that Verizon faces is prioritization. We are so keen and eager to do everything for everyone. We have this understanding of the prowess that we want to achieve. How do we strengthen those muscles? Some of our biggest products that we're shipping have been collaborations with Publicis Sapient. We have a philosophy that you should not really be able to tell the employee from the Sapient employee. And I think, for the most part, that that is very true. The Verizon vision for the future of experience at Verizon is to be as famous for the experience as we are for the network.
The reality is, every experience your customer has, whether it's in your industry or a completely different one, shapes what they expect from your brand. Elevating your customer experience means anticipating rather than reacting to those changes. That's how you can move from now to next. Customer experience is becoming more and more critical for us as a way to differentiate ourselves, as well as as a way to make sure that we're showing up in the market for customers. Technology is changing so fast. Customer needs are changing. Even competitors are changing. And so the race is on. Every minute, every day that goes by where we're not there, it's a missed opportunity. Irrelevance is brutal. There are metrics in the digital world that tell you immediately if you're irrelevant. If you can't continue to keep your eye on the customer ball, you run the risk of becoming irrelevant. We're going to have to be anticipating and thinking about what customers need, and that's a lifelong journey.