Originally Posted by omadave
I completed two stays booked on Marriott.com recently. One at the Wardman Park Marriott in DC, then another consecutive stay at the Renaissance Montura at LAX. Both were booked on the website while logged in with my Rewards number. The receipts for both stays also had the last four digits of my number at the bottom. I always verify this before departure.
One thing I have learned is that having your account number on the receipt doesn't mean anything.
Originally Posted by omadave
Still, NEITHER stay had posted to my account as of two days ago after a week. I called the Gold Rewards # and got a very UNhelpful gentlman who basically argued with me that it could take weeks for the property to submit the stays and there was nothing he could do about it! He told me to fax in the statements. When I said I didn't have a fax machine he said I could go to a Kinkos and fax it from there!!
Yup. The other option is mail. I've memorized their fax number.
Originally Posted by omadave
After further discussion he somehow discovered that the reservations were completed in his system (whatever that means) [...]
That sounds very odd.
Originally Posted by omadave
Yesterday the stay at LAX posted, but still not the first stay in DC. I waited until today and then called the # again. The person I spoke with today was more helpful. She put me on hold and called the hotel to verify. She came back on and said that the points had now been submitted by the hotel and would post within 24-48 hours.
My concern is why couldn't the first person I talked to do this in the beginning without arguing with a customer??? I would hate to see what non-elite members have to deal with if this is the "elite" service...
Two reasons.
1- It's written in the terms and conditions that you are required to keep your hotel receipt, verify the posting of earnings to your account, and submit missing stay requests by fax or mail within one year. (Welcome to MR!) Some of the CSRs have read the terms program (amazing enough!), and think members have to abide by them. Some will insist on receipts. Some will ask for receipts but call the hotel if you ask, and a few reps that answer will go straight to the hotel. Some you call up will dig in their heels on the terms. I read one comment here a few months ago that went like this, "If you don't like what you hear, take a deep breath, hang up, and call for the next rep." Oh, and conversing by e-mail is another matter entirely. I'm not sure what the difference is, but when you e-mail their customer service, they
do not want to contact the hotel. I'm going to have to investigate what the difference there is one of these days.
2- There's 100-150 MR reps (I keep hearing different numbers), and X millions of active members. They have so many missing stay requests each day (literally thousands) that if they called every hotel every time a member called in on a missing stay, it would take enough extra time that the number of answered calls would drop dramatically. On another topic here on this forum, someone was listing MI's profits and mentioning that hiring a few extra CSRs would help. I think that paying to fix their MIS systems for MR would help far more than any number of extra CSRs. Fewer missing stays = fewer phone calls. After that, they should pay them more to stop the enormous turnover they experience; though that goes for the front line hotel personnel earning minimum wage or barely above it, as well.
No, I don't like taking care of missing stays. But it has been this way since the beginning of the program back in 1983. It has not changed one whit since then. Twenty-two years of missing stays, and I despair of it ever changing.