I have been an Ambassador Elite since October of last year. I am not personally a huge proponent or detractor of the program mostly because I just haven't used it enough to fairly assign it an overall grade in my mind however reading this thread for the past 9 months and seeing the recent back and forth between @Bhrubin and @DenConsultMonkey has prompted me to finally write something down that I have been thinking about and I am reminded of every time I read this thread.

I would like to make the modest suggestion that the Ambassador Program, as currently constructed, is fundamentally and fatally flawed and ultimately doomed in its current incarnation primarily for two main reasons:

1. It can never consistently meet the fundamental service promises it currently makes to all its members at its current scale and scope
2. In contrast with the other elite levels, the incremental costs associated with being an Ambassador Elite are almost 100% borne by Marriott Corporate which means that there will always significant internal pressure at Marriott Corp to reduce those costs which will ultimately work in direct opposition to goals of the program.

It follows that the only way for the program to survive will be to re-architect both its benefits/service delivery principles/promises as well as its cost allocations.

Now let me expand a bit on the two reasons why I believe the program, as currently constructed, is effectively doomed.

First, as far as never being able to consistently meet the fundamental service promise of Ambassador Elite to ALL its members, I think this should be obvious to anyone who reads this particular thread.. Sure, there is clearly a group of members that receive excellent service and highly value their Ambassador's (I am looking at you Bhrubin ) but there is just as clearly a group of members who don't, Now I will grant you that some people will probably never be happy no matter what Marriott does, but many people on this thread appear to be unhappy not because the program is failing to deliver on unrealistic expectations of some expensive perk but because their Ambassador is failing at basic tasks, such as responding in a timely manner to rather pedestrian customer service requests. I imagine that the Marriott Lurkers (and Execs) who reads those posts are genuinely horrified at these basic customer service failures as the whole point of the Ambassador program seems to be, at the very least, to prevent them.

That said, that the Ambassador program should fail to consistently deliver on its promises to ALL members should really not be surprising to any reasonably experienced business executive, especially to anyone who has had to build, staff, and maintain a large high-end customer service organization. There are many reasons for this a few of which are:

1. Even with careful hiring and lots of training, there is bound to be significant variance in any highly personalized service delivery; put another way, no matter what Marriott does some Ambassadors will be great and some will be bad.
2. No matter what Marriott does, there will be a regular level of turnover in Ambassadors which will necessarily disrupt the "personalized" service that their high valued elites receive.
3. The nature of "highly personalized" customer service is extremely difficult to operationally plan for as you can't just assign X # of customers to each Ambassador because the service requirements differ greatly by customer. Yes, over a large enough customer base there is an average "service load" that each customer generates, but there is likely such a very high variance in service requests/needs by customer that the actual workloads for any given Ambassador are likely to vary widely even if they have the same number of customers assigned to them making consistent workload balancing, and its resulting consistent service delivery, very difficult to achieve.
4. As the Marriott empire continues to expand at a furious pace both in terms of properties, brands, and locations, it is getting progressively difficult, to the point of impossibility, to train any given Ambassador to be an expert in each and every aspect of the empire, thus their ability to deliver not just personalized, but informed and expert service, is preordained to decline over time. You can only ask (and train) one person to do so much.
5. As others have pointed out, Marriott Corp ultimately does not control the delivery of the vast majority of the service: the individual properties do and there is bound be the same kind of variances in service delivery by property as there is by Ambassador. Marriott can attempt to limit these service inconsistencies through contractual relationships, training and financial incentives, but it will never be able to perfectly dictate service delivery at the property level.

Now I will grant you that many (but not all of these problems) could likely be overcome or at least significantly reduced if Marriott were to commit to making significant investments in advanced customer relationship management software, enhanced training and increased staffing levels (among other things) but this naturally leads to the 2nd reason that the current Ambassador Program is unsustainable and that is that Marriott Corp is bearing almost 100% of the incremental costs of the Ambassador Elite level, which is in stark contrast to the other Elite levels. The primary enhanced benefit of Ambassador Elite vs. Titanium is access to an Ambassador and the direct cost of the Ambassadors is 100% borne by Marriott Corp. In contrast, Marriott properties bear little if any of the cost of the Ambassador level. The only real additional cost to them is Your24 and judging by the posts elsewhere in this forum that benefit seems to be one of the most inconsistently available benefits at that. All this makes the Ambassador program a significant cost-center for Marriott Corp and a growing one at that . It's also a cost that enjoys effectively zero scale benefits so it is destined to increase linearly with increases in the number of Ambassador Elites.

There are few costs that corporate finance executives hate more than significant costs not directly tried to revenue that are growing and do not enjoy scale benefits. There will inevitably be increasing pressure to manage the costs of the Ambassador program and such pressures will either lead to trying to reduce the costs of each Ambassador (offshoring?) or the number of Ambassadors. In other words, the current status quo is not fiscally sustainable.

One might argue that all Marriott needs to do to address the cost issue is to regularly increase the qualification requirements (spend and/or nights), but even if you do this and you are successful in greatly limiting cost growth (you can't completely eliminate cost growth because the costs are people costs and those tend to rise over time no matter what) you still have issue #1 , which is that you structurally can't consistently deliver on the promise of the program even if you are prepared to absorb the costs.

Given these two overall points, I would argue that the Ambassador program, as currently conceived and promised, not only will never be able to consistently deliver on its current customer promises, but as Marriott grows and the program expands, the service delivery is destined to decline overtime either through its inherent structural/scope limitations or the inevitable cost-cutting pressures that come to bear against any large, growing corporate expense.

Personally, I believe that Marriott has to fundamentally rethink the entire organizational structure and service delivery of the Ambassador Program and put in place a new structure that:

A) Guarantees a consistent level of service and expertise for all Ambassador Elites
B) Provides a consistent level of enhanced benefits to its elites while also shifting a greater percentage of the costs of the program back onto the property owners (who are benefiting most directly from the enhanced loyalty) and
C) Breaks the linear and non-scalable cost model that the current program is burdened with.

For anyone left reading, I am going to save my amazing new plan for another post as this one is already way too long, but this is my way of saying that if you like the Ambassador Program as currently constructed, enjoy it while you can because I have been to this movie before and the program as currently implemented seems destined for a major revamp sometime in the next few years as it dawns on both Marriott's marketing and finance people (perhaps during this years's budgeting cycle) that they are pouring increasing amounts of money into a program that can never structurally fulfill its promises to the customer and is also a program that has "unfairly" burdened Marriott Corp with almost all of the incremental costs while providing much of the benefits to its licensees.