I am Hilton Diamond, I have been for the last 4 years.

I changed jobs that used Marriott and now I am Platinum (will easily make Titanium this year. I really like Marriott and feel happy here.
*I love love the 4pm guaranteed checkout
*I have had more recognition & upgrades
*The points go further (and will even with the new tiers)
*Marriott still has tiers with set point redemption per category, Hilton no longer has categories and hotels can adjust their point redemptions on demand.
*Marriotts lounges domestically are much better

What I miss
*Hilton far superior app, and selecting my room
*When Hilton said breakfast 90% of the time it meant breakfast (with the exception of a few properties that only give you cold food, but for a $12 upgrade you can have eggs!). Marriotts breakfast offering is generally a joke, especially in Courtyards. $10/day doesn’t buy eggs bacon and coffee.

Yes, these IT issues are very old. And yes, Marriott needs to step it up. But I’ve been a happy new Marriott member, knowing what the green grass looks like on the other side.

I was legacy Marriott Gold and legacy SPG lifetime (yes) Gold. I’m now Gold, and after two stays since the merger I’m 100% Hilton Gold (soon Diamond). This article confirmed my post merger Marriott experiences including a couple of calls to Marriott CS without resolution (“Sir, there were no mistakes in the transfer of your status, have a good day”) and as loyal as I was to Marriott and SPG, never again.

I had a horrific stay at the W SoBe, billing and service errors left and right (I’m a plat from SPG). When I went to reply to an email about an incorrect folio the return address bounced! It was something like wsouthbeach@starwood blah blah dot com. I called the hotel and they told me they didn’t have access to their email for the next 48 hours as the accounts were being migrated to new email addresses. I was asked to send personal information to the front desk employee’s Gmail account. Uh, no? While I appreciated the effort to get my problem resolved quickly, I was shocked they suggested it. Huge pain. Finally got a hold of the GM and he gave me 100k points, which I was pretty surprised and happy with.

My take on the merger is that Marriot doesn’t know what to do with half the SPG brands. Obviously ones like the Sheraton or element can continue to run but places like the W or Luxury collection seem to be lost in the new corporate minds at the helm of this s#!t show that is the merger.