By William Spain, MarketWatch

CHICAGO (MarketWatch) — Marriott International reported a 76% drop in second-quarter profit, with the hotel-chain giant hurt by the ongoing slump in business and leisure travel — and the company’s stock quickly followed its numbers down the tubes in early trading Thursday.

Bethesda, Md.-based Marriott /quotes/comstock/13*!mar/quotes/nls/mar (MAR 20.48, -1.32, -6.06%) said that it earned $37 million, or 10 cents a share, down from $157 million, or 42 cents, in the year-ago second quarter.

Ultimately, necessity and early adopters will drive telepresence in conference centers/hotels, The VAR Guy believes.

People “follow” when they see/hear about a useful activity. Cisco, for instance, conducts many editorial interviews using TelePresence. Editors, in turn, see the value of the technology in action — even though the briefing has nothing to do with TelePresence.

One can expect investment bankers, corporate CEOs, and executive board members to use TelePresence in Hotels for high-end, high-value meetings. Then, there will be a trickle-down to the regular folks… Like The VAR Guy.

It’s going to take time. There will be mistakes … and many failed business models. But TelePresence in hotels and homes seems inevitable to The VAR Guy.

Short term, tho, the questions Carter raised need to be answered.

Having TP in conference (Pangeair tried an unsuccessful attempt in the Dayton,Oh Convention Center last year)centers you would think, might be perfect. As expressed to me by the Sales Manager of Convention Center, “people would walk by and not really stop, because they had no idea what it was” ( ie, you have to have a dedicated staff person to educate, inform and market the technology).

I am just afraid that it will be hit/miss in a hotel/convention center environment. It may be a nice piece of technology thats placed in some corner of the site, much like bringing a high-end treadmill machine home to your house that after a couple of months becomes your closet with all of your clothes hanging over it.

Here’s some questions. Where is the hotel/Convention center going to obtain the dedicated staff, in these days of major staff reductions. Who is going to market the technology on a local level ? Some of these hotels/convention center are running less than a 40% occupancy. So where are the customers going to come from? Even if a hotel/convention center does a decent job with marketing and staffing, I’m not sure the ROI is even close.

My 2 cents…

However, one of the problems with putting TP in hotels is that the hotel isn’t necessarily part of the normal ecosystem for non-remote, non-traveling employees. There needs to be an additional effort to treat TP sites as a full outsourced “hub” for a spoke of businesses requiring high-touch, high-intimacy remote communications for this to work, I’d think. Not sure that hotels are best equipped for this role, off-hand.

Having worked in hotels and knowing that the hotels have a primary mission of placing “assess in beds” I am less than encouraged that they (hotels) will be the “secret sauce” for TP in public venues.

I am sure that individual franchise owners, concerned about their bottom line, don’t want to get away from their primary missions, given the current recession, with lower occupancy and foreclosures plaguing the hotel and travel industries.

The secret for TP, I believe, as I scrounge around for funding, is a business model in which TP has a minority role,in terms of revenue and is used primarily as a differentiator and perhaps even a loss leader.