Originally Posted by
YoungBubbie
I had a denial for something similar. As they explained when you go all the way through with booking the room is not confirmed immediately. I myself never went that far with the site so I could not corroborate.
I for one would think it has to do with price discovery, i.e. certain OTA quotes very low rates they are not sure the hotel in question would accept. In many cases these could be sort of bait and switch scenarios when the OTA comes back after 24h saying unfortunately the hotel does not accept this rate or this room has been sold out etc.. how about this rate instead...
In all fairness I don't think that these kind of quotes should be part of a BRG/LNF price match.
However if you book say a flexible on request/ not instant confirmation rate and the hotel accepts it I cant for my life understand why this rate would not qualify for a BRG, I mean you have managed to book a publicly available rate i.e. the criterion for price discovery is definitely fulfilled, the fact that there is a time delay in the price discovery do not change the fact that price discovery was made. This is worlds apart from the opaque sites where you don't know what you bought until after you actually bought it, i.e. the price discovery here do not pertain to a specific Marriott hotel room just any hotel room in a specific geographic location within a certain hotel class ( i.e. how many stars) which sometimes happens to be a Marriott hotel.
After approval of BRG/LNF next step is to cancel the 3rd party rate and go on your merry way... this obviously only works for flexible rates..
For non-flexible I am not sure how to solve this issue, one possible solution could be that the LNF team instruct the hotel to deduct the 25% of the booked 3rd party rate and to credit points/nights for the stay in question ... not sure if it would work though