Originally Posted by ethernal

My reservations and contracts are booked through Marriott. The hotels use a Marriott platform to manage room inventory, billing, and invoicing. I book my rooms through a central Marriott system. All of the hotel webpages are hosted on a standard Marriott page. From my perspective, my primary contract is with Marriott and not the hotel. The hotel is the channel that Marriott uses to fulfill its contract with me. Of course the hotel operates within a framework and has significant independence within that framework - they set the specifics of a cancellation policy for example. Perhaps that is not the actual legal construct of the hotel reservation, but that is what it feels like to me. If Marriott does not want to set that expectation, perhaps they should not set up their booking structure to make it seem that way.

Perhaps I am wrong, but I feel like this is the fundamental difference between Starwood and Marriott. With Starwood, corporate would have closed with the hotel to make sure this issue is resolved. With Marriott, you're probably right - I am forced to go through the hotel. Marriott takes no ownership of protecting the guest. But of course, I can't even contact the hotel via e-mail anymore. So I guess let me call and have no audit trail of our discussion and just hope they do the right thing.

I am not okay with that, especially when Marriott is the one who told me that I would not be charged a cancellation fee. In my eyes, the hotel didn't do anything wrong. Marriott is at fault here, and they should fix the mess that they created.