anteater

Oh, they know about it. I report it to them every time I find it. I won’t share what Marriott’s told me, but they actively look for this.

exploreaswego

I wonder how they do this.. Given Marriott's IT, it probably has to done as an inside job, or through hacking the terrible IT system.

kkck19

Thank you for your reply. What I care about is how this system works. A review shows that those who have bought them once in the past have bought them again and once again have the status of Marriott Platinum within a few days. I feel too unfair in this matter. I contacted the seller. I was Japanese so I couldn't buy them. It seems that people who can buy it are only residents of China, Hong Kong and Macau.

nexusCFX

This practice, the rationale, outcomes, etc has been discussed on here before.

Someone said you can *buy* Marriott Plat on Taobao, is it true?

DELee

Yep - here's the proof:

David

garykung

You mean how status can be sold, or how Marriott catches them? Both are quite simple actually.

SPN Lifer

And one might as well take home the toiletries and coffee!

hotelboy

Well all the tweets to @MBOnvoyassist on Twitter are starting to make sense now. Over the past two weeks it seems the vast majority of the tweets are from China complaining about no soft landings from 2018. I was thinking how much fraud was going on from there.

dunno282

buy platinum? it's pretty worthless imo. maybe for a dollar?

kevino

Thank you for giving me your permission.

mingzie

No, China already got extended. These are Tits that got wrongfully hard landed. They aren't just randomly giving people Plat. This has absolutely nothing to do with this topic lol
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CPRich

You're correct that MR does not monitor whether you've entered a REM cycle while within the geographic confines of the physical room to which you've been assigned.

In the non hyper-pedantic world most of us live in, you need to stay/sleep in the room and we understand what that means.

Your definition of "lots" may be interesting. I posit that 99.5%+ of guests physically occupy and sleep in the room they've been provided.

yurtripper

Bear in mind that you're replying to someone who was suspended a year ago.

Alex_I

- there were reports that some of Marriott properties in China are used to quarantine arriving foreigners for 14 days and that the hotels refused to honor status and credit the qualifying nights. Those hotels could credit the nights to other accounts.

ftrichard

Do you know this is happening or it's just speculation?

The fact is that in most cases (and I *know* of hotels being used for by local governments as quarantine facilities in HK, Macau, and Shenzhen), the hotels are taken over by the local health authority and they billet quarantined people into the rooms. At this point, the hotel rooms have *nothing whatsoever* to do with the brand on the wall outside because the local government has taken them over therefore the quarantined individuals have no more rights to qualifying nights than they would if they were billeted to a make-shift dormitory in a converted sports stadium and the hotel's actual management (and its management system) has no jurisdiction or view on who is in their rooms. In some cases (and I *know* this is the case at some such hotels in Shenzhen because my colleague has been placed in one) it's not even regular hotel staff who are working there during this period because of the risk/fear of infection. It's local government health authority employees in their scary hazmat suits with boxed meals brought in from outside.

In the scenario (and I remember reading the outrage on this forum from whoever it was who was billeted by the local health officials at the Bonvoy-brand hotel in China - it was either Shanghai or Beijing wasn't it?) the guest has no relationship with Bonvoy at all. Less relationship, in fact, than if they book through an OTA and don't quality for nights and points because at least in regular times when you book through an OTA the hotel's management is actively managing the hotel. When China officially uses them for quarantine, China is managing the rooms directly and the hotel's regular management is nowhere to be seen so their ability to scam the nights elsewhere would be curtailed.

This is a world away from my experience doing the mandatory 14-days quarantine in a Design Hotel in HK late March that I *booked and paid for* directly as a regular reservation and hence it qualified for nights and points even though I didn't step foot outside the room and was monitored by the HK government for the period.

So, while there can be a great many scams in the Middle Kingdom, I don't think this is the method for this one.

In any case, I don't see why it upsets most people. I see no more justification for people getting upset about this scam than the Rest Of The World getting upset over Americans being able to get 30 qualifying nights by holding credit cards which I view as a legalised scam because I cannot take advantage of it.

The reality is that if you don't qualify as Platinum by 50 actual nights then your ability to milk the system for Platinum benefits will be limited to the number of nights you do stay which isn't many and is probably valued at ~US$30 a night for Club upgrades and if people are buying this benefit in China then they will probably get most of their benefits in China so won't affect most people on FlyerTalk which is populated mostly by English speakers with limited exposure to the Chinese market (unlike users of whatever the Chinese equivalent of FlyerTalk in Chinese will be focused on). And let's not get pedantic about how many people on here regularly stay at Chinese hotels. I live in China myself and *I'm generalising* about the Flyertalk population - some of us of course over index on Chinese hotel stays.

Hmm. Quite a long, meandering, post. Apologies. I have time on my hands right now as we all do...