Originally Posted by hhoope01

First, lets dispell this myth. Marriott has dropped all verbage in their T&Cs about suite upgrades. They are not promising or guaranteeing suites to elites at all. So if they aren't promising it, they can't be lying about it. They may have not excluded suites in their upgrade T&Cs in the past, but they have done so for the last couple of years now.


Fair enough point. So basically what you are saying is that there are dissatisifed SPG Plats and there are dissatisfied Marriott Plats. And each will probably be dissatisfied because of various percieved short comings and weaknesses in their program. BTW, right now would NOT be a good time to go over to the SPG forum to see a lot of love for that program. But I suspect that in a month or so all the "point devaluation" posts will die down.

Ohmark does make a good point in noting that at least SPG looks like they are trying to address their elite benefit issues. Marriott has been a little less forthcoming with showing the same level of interest. But in fairness to Marriott, I doubt they use FT to "mine" information in the same way as Starwood might, at least not as publicly. And again we can argue the merits of Starwood's approach to Marriott's, but this also is a different issue.

Also, I wouldn't take the replies to Starwood Lurker's request for upgrade information as the norm. What I would guess Starwood is looking for are trends pointing to issues at specific hotels or management practices. In general, I would guess that the persons who didn't get a suite upgrade would be more likely to reply than the ones who did. And almost invariably, those type of threads turn into complaint sessions that would limit any statistically good information. Of course that doesn't mean there isn't good information that can be taken from the replies.