Originally Posted by charlesonmission

I know that many people have had issues with Marriott IT, including the recent cert topups (I had to call in for all of them), but this one is a total new issue for me and potentially quite bad. Has anyone else seen/heard anything like this?

1. My Wife was trying to use a 35K cert on a point advance booking. The reservation failed to confirm and we ended up on a screen that said points purchased failed.
2. She also tried to book a straight reservation with the 35K cert and ended up on the same screen that a points purchase reservation failed.

After this happened, we saw that she had fraud alerts from Amex, email, text and later a call.

1. We called in the Marriott asking what is going on. The agent wasn't concerned about the Amex fraud warnings, but she did sort out getting the cert on the reservation after some time (by creating a new reservation and cancelling the point advance booking). I asked the agent that the Marriott team should create a case for the tech team as this is a big deal. We than called Amex and they cancelled the card after Amex asked us if we had done this purchase, which we didn't.
   
2. Next day, the 35,000 points posted to my wife's account. I was floored and we called Marriott to ask what was going on. This agent said that there were 3 point purchase rejections and 1 went through (so 4 attempts in total, which surprised me, maybe it tried twice each time?). I guess Marriott let 1 go through. The agent said point purchases were non-refundable. After some back and forth where I explained that she didn't purchase the points and it is a rather large Marriott IT error, she agreed to upon some sort of special case. Note that the point purchase was never actually associated with a reservation and she never got any email about. it.
   
3. Following day, the $437.50 Marriott post clears on the Amex Business Bonvoy card, we call Amex and ask what is going on. Amex says it is already under review. Then, the next following day, there is a credit back dated for $437.50 on her Amex account (this credit is a fraud return credit from Amex, not Marriott).
   
4. As of today, the points are still in the account. All of this started March 5th.
   

I'm just a bit floored as I've never seen or heard anything like this. Marriott isn't really known for great IT, but this seems to be a huge IT failure. Going forward, we are going to screen record all reservations. We are also going to lock any card for reservations and then unlock the card the next day.

Is there anything else we should do? Any advice? Anyone ever heard of anything like this? Does Marriott monitor this thread? This seems like such a huge issue, I was thinking of reaching out to some Marriott tech people on LinkedIn since I live in the DC area and work on the Salesforce platform which I know Marriott uses, but wasn't really sure if that was a huge breach in protocol or not.