Its very sad but around the time leading up to the SPG merger Marriott customer service tanked in a massive way and never fully recovered. We know the trainwreck IT issues they had with the website for over a year, and customer service was useless as well taking weeks/months to respond via email and the initial responses not even addressing the issue.

Perhaps the impacts and losses from the pandemic will be the slap in the face to the corporation to provide better customer service, but so far its seemed they just used it to hide behind and make cuts and excuses.