I always used to give Marriott the benefit of the doubt, even back to the days of the Anbang bid, but I think I am now seeing their true colours for myself.
I travel to one city repeatedly for work. I stay at one legacy SPG hotel all the time, and stay elsewhere only when I can't get a room there. I have put through 90 nights there already this year (well, I would have except the integration is screwing things up and I am missing nine nights), 60+ in 2017 and 50+ in 2016. I must have racked up almost 50 stays at this hotel in the last three years (I stay 4-5 nights each time). As you can imagine, I have a wonderful relationship with staff and management: we see each other so often it would be awkward if we didn't.
The hotel has always reciprocated my loyalty, and has consistently upgraded me to a suite on every stay since I first qualified for Platinum in 2017. I used to enjoy doing an online check-in on the weekend and getting advance notice of my advance upgrade.
This coming week, my first stay there since the systems integration, I have not received any upgrade at all (well, it says "Club Room", but there's no difference between that and any standard room, except it comes with Club access).
Using the nifty new chat function, I asked the hotel if the Club Room status was final, or was there any chance of an upgrade to a suite. The duty manager replied yes, I have been allocated a Club Room, not a suite. Nothing about the hotel being sold out, nothing about no suite availability. So I asked him very nicely if I could please have a suite (my old SPG profile had a request for suite upgrades stickied to each booking), and I get some stupid pro forma response about "their utmost effort to provide you suite upgrade when available upon check-in".
I'm checking in tomorrow and will report back. I really hope this is just a bad coincidence timing-wise with the integration, but if this is the new attitude, I'm done with Starriott. If 50 stays and 200+ nights in one hotel in under three years can't win you recognition at that property, I think I'm justified in asking what will.