Originally Posted by
Antarius
This is nothing but a tiny blip with mass hysteria on FT. The vast majority of non travel obsessed people (which is the vast majority of people) barely know this is going on. Zero ultra high net worth individuals even care.
marriott has done a poor job of communicating issues, but come on, acting like this will lead to mass defections due to Lifetime Status being wrong for a few days? Only the handful of people here have even noticed.
simply put, unless merging etc is necessary, just wait. Why does it matter to the Platinum Premier member if they are Lifetime platinum right now.. vs in 2 weeks? It doesnt.
I mean you could say this about a lot of things; Hotels, airlines, cell phone providers, ISPs. When you have a giant customer base which spends more on value than loyalty, its easy to think you are too big to fail. Eventually there is a straw that breaks the camels back. Look at cell phones for example. A decade ago switching carriers required a new phone, contract, and new phone number. Now it is amazingly easy to switch to another company. More importantly easy for enterprises to switch.
The purpose of loyalty programs have changed in the information age. Now the big benefit isn't return customers, its collecting the data on them. Seeing what they spend, how they spend it, when, where, etc. Customer data is priceless to them. Google and Amazon already smell blood in the water, and these legacy hotel chains are clenching their cheeks. Why do you think suddenly there is such an emphasis to book direct? All its going to take is another company like uber to come along and completely change how hotels are booked. If you go to marriott's website right now you can't sort by price, you can't filter unavailable properties, half the site still looks like spg. The problems go way beyond reflecting loyal customer data correctly.
So no, this "little" problem isn't going to bankrupt Marriott, but could be symptoms of larger problems to come. SPG properties were popular for a reason. Just like anything in a capitalist society, if Marriott F's this up too badly, someone else will move in and provide an alternative.