FlyerTalk Forums - View Single Post - How to escalate a complaint with customer service?
Old Jul 11, 2019, 12:55 am
  #19  
writerguyfl
 
Join Date: Mar 2008
Location: Fort Lauderdale, FL
Posts: 3,360
Originally Posted by ajamieson
Not sure I understand. If a hotel is consistently failing to deliver any elite benefits, that's the single issue. It's not going to be fixed by the hotel, but by Marriott Bonvoy. There's a systemic problem here and I can't get past "well, we credited the missing points."
The vast majority of chain hotels are franchises. While you may think that Marriott (or any other chain) has the power to fix problems at a franchise hotel, they really don't. The hotel and the chain are two separate business entities with a marketing agreement. The chain simply doesn't have the ability to force any hotel to make operational changes.

That said, there are penalties built into the franchise agreement. In order to remain a Marriott-flagged property, a hotel must have X complaints or less every year. But, how complaints are measured can vary. For example, if a guest complains to corporate that she or he legitimately wasn't offered an upgrade and the hotel lies and says it was offered, corporate will almost certainly not penalize the hotel because they don't know it was a lie. Essentially, the hotel gets the benefit of the doubt.

So the answer to your titular question is that you can't really escalate. Essentially, escalation is merely corporate sending the complaint back to the hotel. The only real exception is if the complaint is related to a life safety issue.

Unless you have irrefutable proof that a hotel is telling lies, your best course of action is to post public reviews and stay elsewhere.

Note: The above information is based on working in both franchise and corporate-owned hotels. It is a macro-level description of how the hotel industry functions. It is not how I think the hotel industry should function.
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