Originally Posted by
X-ON
My own conspiracy infused
view is that instead of coming up with a bunch of rules on how to treat various accumulated years in SPG and MR, the different philosophies with respect to comping status in the two programs, missing SPG points etc. MAR just branded the number of years that going to count in the new program as proprietary so that they could make any arbitrary additions from the recorded SPG years (and the obvious MR years) . That make it very hard to challenge the year count unless you can prove 50+ nights for MR/ SPG. Instead MAR could add years along whatever internal rules they outlined ... maybe being more lenient or stringent towards accounts in geographical locations where they want to grow more or being more lenient towards a famous blogger etc ... we will never know ...
Interesting thought. Like many here I was initially surprised when they refused to enumerate which types of legacy status years would count towards LT status for 2018 forward. But over the last few months I've been even more surprised that we at FlyerTalk haven't collectively figured it out. The problem of course is that we have lots of data points, but they are conflicting, so not conclusive.
The idea that MPG may be treating members differently based on geography, customer "value", or other criteria hadn't occurred to me, and I suppose it could explain things. But on the other hand, there's an old rule that says something like "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence."
Marriott's incompetence around the merger and the IT to support it is well documented. It easily explains inconsistencies in displayed status years. And given that incompetence, the idea that they decided to include additional secret criteria, and that they *implemented those criteria correctly* seems far-fetched.
And my own data point. My year count is on the generous side of what my best guess would have been, and yet by any predictive criteria, my customer value is low relative to my night count (most of my nights are low dollar, credit card, or rollover; I had ~700+ MR nights but only ~700K LT MR points; my status on Aug 17 was only silver).