Advice on escalating customer service issue that has been languishing for 2 months
TLDR: How do I get a "Marriott" person that will -OWN- the issue to its closure promptly and keep me out of the "property" vs "bonvoy" punting game ... ?
Full context :
Back in early december i booked a room at a Renaissance property for family members that were visiting ...
About a week before the checkin date i called Marriott Bonvoy to add the guests names , explicitly stating that I needed my family members to be able to check in without me being there. (a "gifted reservation on points" ) . This all sounded like the steps I had taken on previous similar occasion , nothing unusual, so I was fully expecting a smooth experience ... I had given those same family members gifted reservations at other properties in the US so they understood the process and werent expecting any difficulties ...
Upon Checkin mid-december the Renaissance rejected the reservation stating that I needed to be there ... . after 4 calls to bonvoy and 2h30 min trying with the front desk I had to resort to making a new cash reservation for my family members so that they could get to a bed (midnight local time after 15hrs of travel )... Each time i called Bonvoy the problem was "now" addressed .. only to be rejected by the front desk .. Despite asking : no supervisor / escalation path was available ... (at 11pm on a saturday night at a major airport property)
Once my family checked out and i got confirmation that their credit card was charged for the stay I reached out to Bonvoy via email expressing my strong displeasure at how this was handled and asked for a basic remediation : you keep the points for the gifted reservation your property rejected for an unknown reason and you refund the cash reservation to my family's credit card ...
I received a fairly prompt response from Bonvoy acknowledging the problem , agreeing to the remediation and indicating that they had reached out to the Renaissance to fix as requested .
I was then contacted by a rooms manager at the Renaissance asking for basic details to help track the reservations involved, guests name , and a few other details ..
After a few back and forth by email it appeared clear that he had not been clued into the whole issue and didnt know what needed to be done .
I re-clarified the whole story again , i was given some more apologies and a commitment that he would escalate the issue with Bonvoy and their accounting departments ...
That was mid-january ....
As of today they have the points substracted from my Bonvoy account for the gifted reservation and the charge is still present on my guests card ...
In 30yrs and over 3000nights at Marriott this is by far the issue that looked the simplest to solve yet the one that is taking way more efforts to resolve than anything i ever experienced ...
As a matter of principle and given that no-one is suggesting that I have done something wrong or expected something that was not permitted I truly would like to see my family refunded the cash reservation and Marriott to use the points reservation as initially intended ...
How do I go from here ?.... primarily how do I get a "Marriott" person that will -OWN- the issue to its closure promptly and keep me out of the "property" vs "bonvoy" punting game ... ?