Long time Marriott Plat, just switched this year to PC for several reasons. Hoping experience was the same. Not even close.

Forget the individual properties, I have stayed at good and bad hotels within each program. I am talking about one of my biggest reasons for belonging to a loyalty program. I call the "elite" reservations line to have them help me with special reservations I can not easily make online.

With Marriott I always got 3 things: specialist was knowledgeable, friendly and spoke English as a primary language. About a half dozen calls to PC Plat line this year and I am nothing but disappointed and missing Marriott.

I understand the cost savings in off-shoring -- I work in the I/T industry. But for your top tier customers there is no excuse to have to struggle to communicate with someone who is barely fluent in English. I have consistently talked to people who were unfriendly/unhelpful, barely understandable and could not handle a question more complicated than date, location, number of persons and room type. Anything outside of those boundaries and I get "that will be no problem sir" followed by an explanation that shows they have no idea what I am asking.

On top of that the system of splitting the reservation into two reservations if you are doing a stay where only some of the days are paid for by points just shows a reservation system that needs to be updated. I could go on with another 3-4 petty inconveniences but all together if the Marriott program gets 5 stars (for treatment of Platinum's anyway) then the PC program is struggling to maintain 1 star.

I have a few more weeks this year to maintain plat with PC for 2014 (not sure why I want to) then its back to Marriott for the rest of the year!