Originally Posted by
ftrichard
The question is key but I don't think the answer is necessarily that it's all down to bad IT. Obviously we don't have visibility of the systems that hotels use or the processes they have in place to post stays and points but I get a greater feeling that the root cause of many missed stays or incorrect points lies with the hotel itself rather than the IT mangling a correct post.
For example, I have two examples of missing stays (ok, one stay and one F&B) that didn't post and a quick email directly to the hotels in question resulted in the stay/points posting within 24 hours. I had two examples of incorrect points posting (both missing the 1000 Welcome Bonus points). Two emails later and one was fixed immediately by the hotel while the other took escalation to the FT Lurkers - it was before LeM hotels moved to the Marriott system and once posted (incorrectly) the hotel couldn't retrieve the post and fix it at the time.
For me, the IT problems are about incorrect application of programme rules (such as the current 50/75 night choice outage) rather than endemic to the posting of points which I suspect is down to errors at individual hotels. But I could be wrong. The hotels could be posting everything on the day of check out entirely correctly and the posts are being delayed and mangled by Marriott's technology.
Agree that MAGC and welcome points are usually a hotel issue (which is why I said "the normal issues" with them). Stays not posting at all, or points being mangled against paid rate? That is 100% an IT failure. It is either an IT failure because the sweep is not picking up the stays from the hotel systems or it is an IT failure because there is something so non-intuitive with the MARSHA system that hotels can check guests in, check them out, generate a final folio, and bill a credit card and yet somehow not have that pass to the loyalty program system.
Is the hotel perhaps not pressing some menu item or setting the right field value? Maybe, but that is still an IT failure because there is no reason for the link to the loyalty program sweep / database to be dependent on the hotel mashing the right series of keys if the guest has otherwise been successfully checked in and checked out in the system.