AMEX will eventually take back the fraud credit. I would not even bother to contact either Marriott or AMEX when Marriott processed the refund. Every bank does Audit on fraud credit they issued, they will recognize the books subsequently. I have an IHG hotel charged me 5 months after a point stay. Hotel is in Italy. Could not get a person speaking English, as the only person who speaks English was on vacation each time I called. Filed dispute with Chase which issued a credit. Eventually IHG customer relation dept (based in Manila) got hold of the hotel which eventually issued a refund. A month later Chase sent me a postcard informing me the credit Chase issued is now reversed as Merchant had issued a refund.
I am sure AMEX would do the same given its system is more robust than Chase.
There is no need to freeze one's CC in making reservation if you do the workaround I described in other thread, and probably another thread prior to this on Cert not attached to booking nature. To me that is far easier than go thru the trouble to freeze and unfreeze one's CC. But of course YMMV. I have made 3x 3 certs bookings during this period that so many have issues, yet all my bookings using the work around method went thru without any drama.
It is almost like defensive driving, the workaround I figured out, is my defensive system not to be trapped by Marriott's crappy IT which I suspect will continue IF their IT functions remained outsourced (to China, as the IT works in final handling of SPG merger was done by programmers inside China ).
Originally Posted by
charlesonmission
I was one the one that posted the longer thread on this topic.
1. Marriott did refund my wife the points purchased. However, Amex had also given her a fraud credit. As has been pointed out, I would not recommend contacting Amex/CCs that this is fraud since I think that Marriott will eventually figure it out (we didn't know that Marriott had pushed a charge through, 3 were outright rejected by Amex). The trick seems to be getting the case to the right person. My wife has notified Marriott that she now has 2 credits and is awaiting an update. Marriott did take back the 35,000 points.
2. Freezing the credit card when doing a point advance/point/cert booking is no issue at all since Marriott isn't supposed to charge anything at the time of booking.
3. Front line agents are not able to handle any of these types of issue since they read from a script. I'm not saying ignore them, but they are just going to read from a script that says points purchases are non-refundable. They don't really have a script that says, oh points purchases are refundable when there is an IT error, etc. It was a long call, but we did get the second Marriott agent to create a case.
I'm open to ideas on how customers are supposed to handle these types of issues that are IT issues. Should we use DM Marriott at Twitter, email the reps here? I'm not sure what the best solution is, but would love to hear it.
We are both long-time Marriott customers including Marriott Vacation Club (which is actually a different company now). Some of us just have to push threw this and come to a solution with Marriott even if it takes time. I'm not here to defend Marriott, but it isn't as simple as just go to a competitor for some of us depending on where we stay, etc.