hockeyinsider

What's more surprising is how incompetent the loyalty program executives at Hilton, Hyatt and IHG must be as none of the competing programs have tried to poach dissatisfied legacy Marriott or legacy SPG customers.

kaizen7

come to think about it, maybe its not, as anbang dont have anything to merge with

they might just keep all spg system intact.
not sure about the customer service though

JBord

Which is a very SPG-centric view. While not perfect, Marriott's technology worked fine pre-merger for about 4x the number of properties as SPG. Perhaps they weren't comfortable the SPG system could handle the larger size and accommodate future changes? We have no idea what the reasons were.

But "it's newer and it's what I'm used to" isn't necessarily a good way to make an IT decision, especially when it means that 4x the employees would have to be retrained. Besides, the errors are in the execution. Maybe it would have been much worse if they migrated to the SPG system.

It reminds me of the UA-CO merger where UA customers, including me, were questioning why they picked the CO system which was much less robust than UA. They ultimately had to build additional systems/interfaces to make it work as well as the UA system had. But in the end, I think either system would have worked, the errors were in the planning and execution of the migration.

okrogius

CO was a smaller airline and with an inferior system. It was just cheaper than UA. In hindsight, that was a bad decision -- but maybe after a very long while they'll recoup the costs.
AA had both a better system and used by larger airline, so that was likely an easy choice. Plus they did a great job of switching over gradually instead of in one weekend.

SPG has better technology, but used by fewer users. Going with a larger system is a plausible option without knowing all of the details.

BarrenLucidity

As a guy that does a lot of M&As from the IT side, it's usually a matter of who has the knowledge for integration. If one side has a proven 'playbook' and the other side doesn't, it's usually a "well we have a plan already." Plus that Marriott system probably never goes down. At 40 years old that thing is probably an AIX backend that's rock solid.

pinniped

That's weird...I didn't fly CO at all, but when the "old" United.com was updated to essentially be the CO platform, I actually liked it more. I can see more award availability throughout the Star Alliance, which is a huge differentiating factor for me amongst all of the (mostly terrible) airline websites out there. Not perfect, but a lot better than AS, AA, or BA. A *lot* better!!

I loved the SPG site. Haven't been a big fan of the Marriott site for many years. Really liked being able to see the matrix of award, C&P, my corp code, and the regular rates on one screen. Very easy to see everything at a glance.

aCavalierInCoach

"incompetent"? You mis-spelled "oligopolistic"

CCIE_Flyer

MotelRomeo

Hey, the same thing happened for me today as well. I was Marriott PP pre-merger, and had Ambassador status on the first couple days after August 18. That disappeared, seemingly after I linked my SPG account, and reverted back to normal PP. Maybe one of the ambassadors will be in contact with me soon.

Edit: App still has me listed as LTPP without ambassador

sdsearch

SPG also had way fewer hotels. A hotel list in grid form (up to 4 rates horizontally, hotels vertically) may work when you have maybe a dozen hotels returned in an SPG search in a crowded metro, it doesn't work too well when you have 100+ hotels returned for the same search for Marriott-only, let alone 100++ hotels returned for the same search for Marriott+Rtiz+SPG. So IMHO the SPG hotel search engine was not "scalable" to the vastly greater number of properties in the new program.

sdsearch

I've only seen a bit of softness at one Delta hotel (which had problems getting customers before the merger, as it was a recent conversion from a Crowne Plaza right next to both a long-term Sheraton and a long-term Marriott Suites.

But keep in mind that a lot of people book through third-party websites, or over the phone with hotel directly, and those are likely not that much affected by the merger. So I think that's what explains why there's not much softness in rates, because people who aren't concerned with earning points on stays are not booking where you and I are booking.

itsaboutthejourney

I give you credit for the most creative, albiet laughable, excuse for Marriott downgrading the superior features of spg.com

scubadu

Well, my sense is that many of the "dissatisfied" folks in this thread will just be dissatisfied folks in a different FT thread if they change horses. Much of the dissatisfaction will remain the same (e.g. I didn't get upgraded to a suite even though I know one was available, this quarters promo sucks, why can't I qualify with the criteria I want to qualify with, I can't believe they devalued this program again, doesn't loyalty count for anything anymore, etc, etc...)

The beat goes on...

Regards

DJ_Iceman

Indeed, and if I thought the Marriott execs were this Machiavellian, I would say they're dragging out the pain SOLELY to weed out the highest-maintenance/never-satisfied customers.

As for the supposed superiority of the SPG website compared to the Marriott website, I never found the SPG one all that user friendly or even functional, actually. I can't tell you how many times I would search through the rate matrix and click on a rate, just to have the system come back with "the rate you selected is no longer available", sending me back to the beginning of the process all over again. Until about a year ago, the Marriott site was solid, easy to use, nice to look at, intuitive, and clean. I don't know that it had anything to do with the impending merger, but with every change they've made since then, Marriott IT has taken a step or two backwards in terms of functionality.

UA-NYC

Marriott site is all about reducing transparency (which is never a consumer friendly thing), case closed. Harder to search multiple rates at once. Can't find hotel contact info. Massive downgrade all around.