Originally Posted by
X-ON
I went ahead and requested my lifetime points accumulation (from 2001). After some initial confusion, it seems that the CSRs are not very familiar with the concept of "lifetime points".
It turns out that this is a procedure that takes 10 business days to perform. The CSR referred to it as a master statement, at least we now know that we can request lifetime points from 2001 and onwards.
It seems that there is no automation of this request, however thefact that it take 10 business days to pull out but that they did have no problem sending it over means to me that:
1) The data points exists (at least from 2001)
2) The data is not on one system, more likely on different system servers or maybe even on tape backups (or dare I say it on paper)
3) To integrate these data points into a new MPG system can most likely be done if MPG decide to do it. It's going to be question of how much it will cost. But I would hope there are a significant merger budget for IT integration
Just my 5 cents on the topic
Ok this might be a little bit of a rant and I apologize in advance.
I received my master-statement but I discovered quite fast that it indeed was incomplete all activity prior to 1 Jan 2003 was missing. After being told by the CSR that I did not have any activity prior to 1 Jan 2003 and if I had, I had to get the folios (from 15Y ago
) as proof, it was expressed in quite a rude fashion.
I said: "Really? So please sum up the number of points on my master statement" the balance it came to something like -11K ... crickets .... ehhh... Then I continued: "look at the beginning of the statement, on Jan 20 2003 I redeemed 20K when I according to your master-statement I only managed to earn 10K since 1 Jan 2003" How do you explain that? .... more crickets ... She asked have you by any chance had more than one account with us and then merged the accounts, maybe that's why its missing? I said "No, but even if I had that it still do not explain the difference if I merged any accounts there would be a credit in the master statement with the balance from the closed account".... Finally the CSR gave in and said " Ok we will look into this issue something is wrong"
Anyway the main thing is that maybe it is not that straightforward to retrieve a complete activity trajectory for each SPG member . I still think it is possible since they manage to track my nights correctly (but I am starting to doubt that now).
I know from another another industry (Investment Banking) that behind the scenes there might be a myriad of systems supporting the business and a lot and I mean a lot of off the cuff solutions. These off the cuff solutions can sometimes have many unintended consequences further down the line.
At one point in time a certain action was maybe possible to do , but then somebody makes some arbitrary solution to a seemingly unrelated problem, and what was once possible to do is now impossible but since no one thought about this action being important .... gone.
Let's hope that is not the case here but if it is ...at least they managed track my nights correctly (I think)... I could be so easy that activity prior to 1 Jan 2003 is stored in a legacy system that hopefully is still accessible ...