As many of us painfully aware, Marriott does enhancements to its web site often which usually brings another flashy feature wanted my their marketing team. Frankly they should make their marketing team actually use the web site. Most of the time this results in new bugs, or one of the most annoying things (for me) is the web site requiring more mouse clicks to do what only took a couple previously, and occasionally functionality that used to be provided which has disappeared.
This thread has been started mainly to provide the FT community work arounds for Marriott's web site inadequacies resulting from their IT department's lack of regression testing, logic and lack of attention to time management from users' perspectives. Secondly it provides a place to document these inadequacies should Marriott actually care to do something about it, which from my personal experience of providing extensive details to them directly a year or two ago on issues that have still not been corrected, they don't.
When making a reservation Marriott.com no longer automatically guarantees ones preferred room type.
I have found 3 ways to guarantee ones preferred room type during the reservation process (thanks to NJUPINTHEAIR for originating this issue in another thread).
- On the rate selection screen before selecting the rate, click on the + sign in front of the statement Room & Accessibility Preferences (optional). Your preferred room type will be selected. Then click the Continue button for that rate.
- If you forget to do step 1 above, then on the next screen click the edit link where it says Room edit right below the dates and above the room description.
- Or, the third method; if you forgot to do step 1, you can go back to the previous page and do step 1.
View All Reservations takes too many mouse clicks
One thing that totally annoys me is going to View all reservations. What used to take 2 clicks now takes 5 clicks.
- Sign into your Marriott account
- Click My Reservations in upper right corner of web page
- The in drop down box click on View All Reservations (this is a lie, because only the first 5 reservations are listed)
- Then down toward the bottom of the reservations page click the View drop down box.
- Click All and finally all your reservations will be listed
Workaround is to save this link, or one similar, on your toolbar:
Code:
https://www.marriott.com/reservation/findReservationList.mi?upcomingResRecordsPerPage=40&toggleUpcoming=true
Change 40 in the link above to whatever number you want. It does not have to be exact. If I only have 23 reservations (or any number up to 40) it will still work, but if I have 53 reservations it will only list 40.
To use the link above and to display all of your reservations in 2 clicks:
- Sign into your Marriott account
- Click on the link you saved on your toolbar; by default it has the Marriott logo and I titled mine to be Reservations
Sign In
In the upper right hand corner, enter your email or rewards# and then password, or just password if your email or rewards# is remembered, and then press the enter key and you're signed in.
If you haven't signed in then when attempting to make a reservation, up pops a java applet which allows you to sign in. This is where you enter your email or rewards# and your password, or just your password if your email or rewards# is remembered, and then press the enter key, but nothing happens. To sign in this way, you have to grab your mouse and click the SIGN IN button, since the enter key does not work.
No workaround for this one, just annoyance because I, like I assume so many others, are just in a habit of hitting the enter key since our hands are already on the keyboard.
Print Using IE Produces Gobbledygook
When printing out a reservation in Internet Explorer, it prints 3 pages of gobbled gook including the underlying web page below the pop up print window.
Workaround: use Chrome.
Map Functionality Changed
They did something to the search/map function now so I'm not able to view a list of hotels with the map... its either a list or a map. With the map I'd have to click on each one try to get rate info. What used to be a decent map function is now useless especially when there are a couple hotels close to each other that overlap, as you have to infinitely zoom in to be able to click on one to try to get the hotel rate/details.
Not Able to Search for Hotels Along a Route
Another "enhancement" was removal of the ability to search for hotels along a route. If anyone knows a workaround for that, I would love to hear it. My current workaround is to plot a route on Google Maps and then plug in cities along the route into Marriott's search engine.