On Monday night (Asia time) I made a booking on Marriott.com using points for 5 nights (the redeem 4 get 5 nights deal) for 140,000 points at the JW Marriott Shanghai Tomorrow Square. In the usual way I entered my credit card details for guarantee purposes, and it generated the booking confirmation page. I thought nothing more of it and flew to Shanghai on Tuesday, assuming it would show up in the SPG/Marriott app and also be in my email account.

Imagine my horror then when I arrived at the JW Tomorrow Square on Tuesday night (yesterday) to discover that the hotel has no record of my booking. The lady, Karen, kindly helped me charge my phone so I could look up the app and my email to retrieve the record. I was then horrified to discover that the booking was not displaying in the app, no points had been deducted, and that no email had been sent despite having seen a booking confirmation page with confirmation number the night before. I never print those pages when booking with the hotel direct because I expect the hotel to have a record and have never had a problem before.

In fairness to Karen at check-in, she did try hard searching the system and even called the other JW and Marriott City Centre just to double check that I hadn't inadvertently booked the wrong Marriott, although I was always 100% certain that I had booked the Tomorrow Square.

As a result of the incompetence of the Marriott IT people, I had to waste an hour of my time in embarrassment at the JW Tomorrow Square and pay for an extra taxi fare to go to another hotel. This is an utterly ridiculous situation and I think it only fair that Marriott HQ offer some points in compensation for the inconvenience.

In the meantime, take this post as fair warning not to trust the Marriott.com or SPG.com websites, and to always screenshot or print booking confirmations because you can't trust the system to work.