Originally Posted by
flyerdude88
The scariest thing about this new partnership was the fact that upon entering my MP number to register it already knew my Marriott number even though I've never done any cross promotions between the two. Oh well big data at its best.
I suspect in negotiations, both companies swapped databases of their elites and did a match, identifying how many newbies it would actually result in, as well as the increased demands this would generate on each partner. Likely there was a high degree of elite overlap. Once the agreement was signed, these elite databases were merged and yours was pretty much merged and awaiting your buy-in (as would be required under commerce and anti-trust regs).