Short answers, pulled from the story.
Marriott International, Inc. was formed in 1993 when the Marriott Corporation split into two companies: Marriott International, which franchises and manages properties, and Host Marriott Corporation. The corporate predecessor, the Marriott Corporation, traces its origins to 1927 when J. Willard Marriott and his wife Alice opened a root beer stand in Washington, D.C.
Marriott International operates 9,361 properties containing 1,706,331 rooms in 144 countries and territories. It is the largest hotel company in the world by number of available rooms.
On the 30th of November 2018, Marriott disclosed that former Starwood brands had suffered a data breach linked to a Chinese intelligence-gathering operation suspected of working on behalf of China's Ministry of State Security. Marriott initially reported 500 million customers' data was exposed, later revised to fewer than 383 million. The UK Information Commissioner's Office fined Marriott £18 million for GDPR violations connected to the breach.
Marriott Bonvoy is Marriott's loyalty program, formed in February 2019 by merging three earlier programs: Marriott Rewards, Ritz-Carlton Rewards, and Starwood Preferred Guest. The program has five tiers above the base membership level, with the top Ambassador Elite tier requiring at least 100 nights and $23,000 in annual spending at Marriott properties.
Marriott acquired a 49% interest in The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company in April 1995, at an estimated cost of about $200 million in cash and assumed debt. The following year, Marriott spent $331 million to acquire The Ritz-Carlton Atlanta and a majority interest in two additional properties. Marriott gained majority ownership of the full Ritz-Carlton brand in 1998.
On the 3rd of October 2014, the FCC fined Marriott $600,000 for deliberately jamming guests' personal Wi-Fi hotspots at the Gaylord Opryland Resort and Convention Center in Nashville. Marriott used a Wi-Fi deauthentication feature to disrupt client-owned mobile hotspots. Marriott lobbied to have the rules changed to allow the practice but abandoned that effort in early 2015 under pressure from technology companies and mobile carriers.