Originally Posted by
btonkid12345
Yes, it does make a difference. This is not a small mom and pop operating; this is the world's biggest hotel company that likely has consulting firms in there managing towards this deadline.
It clearly makes a huge difference to you and some others, and yet it makes little difference to me and others. I’m going to take a gues that the former group is much smaller than the latter group. Regardless, bellyaching isn’t going to change when that start date might be.
This is the same complaint we hear about a hotel not opening as scheduled; anyone prudent knew that was likely to be the case already.
It is thus perplexing that we are in the last month and they are playing games with the start date in August. Among other things. They should have provided a PP slide/visual that showed all the pertinent dates relating to members in 2018 so that we could know the last day, for example, to book under the old rates.
It may be perplexing to you, but it’s not at all surprising to most of us. They’re not playing games to me, but working hard to get it done as quickly as they can—with the inevitable delays that always come from merging two huge corporate structures. The playing games here seems to be done by people like you (and most everyone else) who want to speculate and make out on the award changes. That’s the pot calling the kettle black if ever I saw it!
The fact that their call centers for elites alone are overwhelmed shows how little consistent information they've provided to their customer base en masse (not just those of us with more awareness here on this board) and how unprepared they are, at least with regards to merging call center operations, at handling customer volumes (which they've known for 2+ years now).
The fact that their call centers are overwhelmed shows that they’ve not managed the transition with their call centers well—and nothing more. You’re trying to draw conclusions to satisfy a confirmation bias that Marriott is out to screw people somehow. But those conclusions aren’t supported by what’s going on.