In the dying days of the SPG programme they switched Plat chat to a Marriott system which was significantly worse than SPG (agents were not trained and didn’t even get passed account info) but stopped working entirely after a few days when wait times went above the time that anyone waited. It was then withdrawn.

I can only hope they reintroduce an online chat facility when (let’s not say if) Marriott customer service comes back online, and that they ideally learn some lessons from SPG and make it a moderately positive user experience.

It was was my experience with Plat Chat which made me commit enough stays to get to Ambassador in the first place. If I were to one year lose my Ambassdor the programme would lose a lot of its appeal if the next level down means little to no channel of communication to the programme for hotel bookings or queries.