I heard a lot of the support staff walked out due to the negative changes so a lot of them now are new employees with little knowledge

I was at the Nationals' game yesterday. When the jumbotron listed the groups in attendance, I noticed that there was a Marriott IT group in the stadium. I was seriously tempted to seek them out so that I could provide some feedback on their recent misadventures.

A miniscule issue in the grand scheme of Marriott's current spectrum of challenges.

If you knew it showed active and have previous experience with multiple chains, and had the cancellation policy still on your side, why not call the property directly? I always prefer a local human to a call center human

yeah - not sure where the 'crooked chain' comes in.
A little dramatic.

I don't often cancel reservations fortunately, but I encountered a similar problem last month -- canceling two rooms on one reservation. Somehow after a few tries it all went through. I hope they do take notice and deal with this glitch since it would be a pain to have to call each time. The hotel was overseas so I definitely wouldn't want to have to call the hotel.

OP, you could have saved yourself a lot of aggravation by simply calling the property & asking if they saw the reservation canceled in their system & asked them for the cancel #.

Cheers.

I highly doubt that - these aren't exactly highly paid employees who can afford to be unemployed.

Of course, Marriott could have saved the OP a lot of aggravation if they did the job they claim to do. Unfortunately, we can't seem to count on Marriott for that. :(

Wow the Marriot website sucks compared to Starwood
 

With Starwood it was so easy and intuitive to search hotels, and compare whether you wanted to pay $, use points and cash or all points and how much each was. I don't see that functionality at all with Marriott. I don't even see at all how to even get the points redemption prices for a hotel for a certain range of days.

Is there some secret hidden page or link? Or does the website just really suck that bad?

Just be thankfully you had it return search results. A lot of time, it can't even accomplish that...:D

Reminds me of the classic MADtv "Lowered Expectations" series of sketches

Starwood site was great, Marriott is mediocre on a functioning day...have found Hyatt to be about as robust as Starwood, which is nice

I'm not sure to which support staff howtofreetravel was referring. But, if it was general phone agents, there are many opportunities to switch to other companies. For example, the main call center for the hotel chain I used to work at is located in Omaha, Nebraska. Omaha is home to call centers for Carlson, Omni, Hyatt, and Marriott.

I could certainly see how Marriott phone agent would get tired of dealing with problems all day. Hotel phone agents usually get incentivized based on their ability to sell. They don't get penalized for handling calls that don't provide an opportunity to sell (like cancelations). But, if the bulk of their calls are now "the website won't let me..." calls, that means they get fewer pure sales calls. Fewer opportunities to sell means it becomes harder to meet goals to earn extra money.

A Marriott call center agent would have to be a glutton for punishment or unnaturally loyal to not consider moving to a competitor (if there is one locally). Those local competitors would certainly welcome an experienced Marriott agent.

I concur that Marriott is a deadly combination of incompetent and unethical

You know for a lot of people simply calling a property is not so simple. A lot of people travel internationally and international calls on mobiles can be costly and can often drop at the precise moment you try and conclude the transaction after providing 10 bits of identification, which has happened to me several times when dealing with credit card issues overseas. Much simpler to just have a working online portal. I would have just submitted an online complaint/query saying I want the room cancelled or if they supplied email addresses for properties like SPG used to do you could have simply emailed them and had a written confirmation of the communication for the later credit card dispute!