rj123456

I used 2 GCs at the Hotel Apollo in Amsterdam.

​​​​​​Mentioned this at check in and they made sure that a staffer who knew how to process GCs would be available at check out. They would not do it the previous day and it still took 20-25 minutes, so keep a time buffer.

margarita girl

I believe what happens is when they check the balance, it will give the amount in the local currency, so should not be an issue.

us1549

Gift card use was denied due to 3rd party charge. UGH

Q. What can a Marriott GiftCard be used for?
A. At participating locations, GiftCards can be used for stays, dining, spa, golf and more.



Please note that while Cards are usable at the Eligible Brands and Marriott Bonvoy Boutiques listed above, they may not be usable at non-affiliated third-party establishments that are located within or on the same property as Eligible Brands .



Marriott GiftCards cannot be used for Third Party charges; the provided receipt shows that the hotel paid a third party for these fees.

loganre17

Thanks - funny. I'm staying there next week

Happy

I cannot do a copy paste with chat conversation. They said �unfortunately Marriott Gift Card is not an applicable form of payment if stay�

I need to find Moxy BER email address to send the GM a note to ask why? Moxy is participating brand on Narriott Gift Card website which I put in the URL on my reply of the chat.

margarita girl

I guess they'd rather pay the 2-3% credit card fee.

I'd suggest contacting the gift card support number in the wiki.

Happy

I already gave the property the Givex info but to no avail.

The same chat rep replied back saying after checking with team leaders the answer was still a No.

I sent an email to the GM, his Assistant and the “Crew” general name of FD. Honestly I hate Moxy but it was originally fit well with our need to overnight at BER for next morning’s train. Now the need does not even exist due to DB has canceled our trains (both segments one followed with the other). So now we have to head into Berlin Hbf for our train anyway.

The hotel is owned / operated by a rather new company called hotelco51 which started operation in late 2020, currently owns about 40 properties incl CY and Resident Inn, It is the largest Moxy owner in Marriott group. Moxy DUB is not owned by them but a much smaller, 14 hotels only group, yet Moxy DUB complied with the brand policy.

PS
The GM’s email using the usual First name.last name format at hotelco51 came back as a fatal error. The assistant’s email went thru.

My suspicion is, they never put Givex in their system since hotel opened in late 2022. Another strange thing is, many complaints on the net said no one speaks German at a hotel located 1.5 km from Berlin Airport!

SanDiego1K

I used a gift card at The Tasman in Hobart, Tasmania. They easily and flawlessly applied it to my charges.

Happy

Alright, I received an email reply from Marriott Gift Card Support Team. Moxy BER is NOT a participating location.

Below is the response I got from Givex after opening a case with them.

Thank you for contacting Marriott gift card support team.

Unfortunately, the location is not a participating location, meaning you can't use your gift card at that location,

Each location has its own policy as stated in the email you received, and for this location, gift cards are not accepted as a form of payment.

You could always use your gift card in another Marriott participating location.

Best Regards,
Marriott gift card support

Now, this IS a False Advertisement when Marriott claims its gift card can be used in a long list of brands but fails to inform the customers that it is actually ONLY good at a “participating” location.

We don’t know how the gift card profit is coming out from which party, it may not be a simple and may be even a naive assumption a property can save 2+% transaction fee thru accepting Marriott gift card as a payment form. Otherwise it is hard to understand WHY some (actually the majority of them my travels encountered) do NOT participate.

This also goes to tell you, contacting Givex on non participation is a worthless pursuit. Though I am surprised by getting a response so quick I.e. within the same day.

At the end of the day, I still feel the 20% saving requires A LOT of Work AND A LOT of LUCK to materialize the saving.

Happy

A change of luck - this time at Leipzig Marriott. They have one person knows how to process Givex Gift Cards. But instead of the steps listed in the wiki, this property uses the system as what I have encountered in Nov 2022 at Renaissance LHR. The property needs to send an email to Givex to apply the gift cards to the folio, and can only take the money AFTER the guest has checked out. The latter part is due to German financial regulation.

I believe I posted my experience at Renaissance LHR. This is the second property in over 18 months I have come across a different system that getting payment from Givex requires sending an email to request it…

On top of that, the guy told me last year the hotel had processed ONLY 2 Givex payments! He said I was the first Givex payment processed this year, and he had a gut feeling that might end up being the only case this year! He told me he had a colleague at Marriott Berlin, who asked around the whole team if anyone knew how to process Givex gift card, only one person knew and that person was from a property in San Francisco!

Thankfully this gentleman understands why we the Americans like to use gift cards, because of the promotion discounts.

It once again, circles back to the fact that using Marriott gift card is a total luck of draw - the biggest hurdle of course, is that the property you stay at is a participating location!

yuel

Anyone else having issues purchasing gift cards, I keep getting transaction "Payment transaction failed", Its been two weeks of trying to purchase gift cards for two weeks, used different browser, different cards, different laptops, same message!

curlycabbage

Make sure your address and zip/postal code absolutely match what's on your credit card, and try different combinations to include extra space, dash, etc.

Last year I had this issue, because Canadian postal codes typically have a space between the first 3 and the last 3 digits. Once I tried making this change (either removing or adding the space, can't remember which one anymore) the transaction went through right away.

newfbc

I'm currently staying at aLoft, Birmingham UK. They have told me they cannot accept my gift card because they have no way to process it.

Ron.

Happy

Just when I thought my luck finally changed to better in using the gift cards, the devil took a nasty turn - Leipzig Marriott that told me it can take multiple gift cards for payment, ended up cleaned out BOTH gift cards balances, a total of 460.11 euro to pay a 314.28 euro folio…

I checked out on Mar 29th. The folio showed total balance of 314.28 euro to be paid by 2x corporate gift cards. It looked perfectly fine on the invoice with zero balance.

They did not processed the gift cards when I last checked it on April 1st. When I checked again on April 4th, I saw on April 2nd they took the full balances if both cards in equivalent euro based on the amount they saw on March 28th, which added up to 460.11 euro in total for a 314.28 euro folio! What they should do would be to “empty” out the balance of one card, then subtract the 1st payment from the folio balance, giving a balance still owed. Then take that amount from the second gift card, which would leave a 145.83 remaining balance on one gift card. In fact, due to Euro went down a tad between March 28 they got the balance numbers from the gift cards and the date of April 2nd when the gift cards were processed, even though they “emptied” out the balances on the cards, the Givex system still shows a 1,36 and 1,77 USD balance on respective card…

Of course the much bigger problem IS, the hotel Has OVERCHARGED me by 145.83 Euro, without even realizing it.

Once I found out this mistake, I immediately sent the hotel an email with attached screenshots of the gift card activities showing the charges, and the picture of a handwritten note of the calculation a front desk associate wrote down for me on the night of March 28th. It was correctly done on his handwritten note. Whoever sent the email to Givex to apply the amount messed it up, apparently only looked at the available balances of the gift cards, WITHOUT realizing the total of 460.11 far exceeded the folio amount if 314.28 owed…

After sending the email, I also called the hotel and talked to a FD person name Claudia, she said she was the only Claudia there. She was immediately saw the overcharged amount. I guess now the folio should show a credit balance of 145.83 euro. Of course she said she needed to talk to her supervisor on this and they need to figure out a way on how to refund me the money. She said it would be tomorrow the earliest they could reply me by an email…

So now I have to stay on top of this mess in order to get my own money back…. Given their system in processing the Givex gift card, (need to send an email request, versus the more common method we know, directly enter the transaction in Givex system), I suspect it will take a rather long process to get my money back. SIGH.

A small update - upon calling the hotel 2 more times later in the afternoon and in the evening, there are some rather “interesting” tidbits popped up in the conversation -
I was told

1) my earlier emails were not found in the system,

2) Claudia actually is a manager, who has full access of the general email address (of course), that she might have forwarded those to her own email account… (but wouldn’t it still has the initial receipts remaining in the reception email account?)

3) Another associate with whom I had some chat during the stay because of some system automatically generated credit card authorizations on my AMEX on file when the FD is fully aware that the stay would be paid by Marriott gift card. This associate said he would “move” the guarantee card to a second screen so the system would not auto authorize an amount… He too, was fully aware of the usage of gift cards - sent me a brief email while we were still on the phone, to make sure the email communication is working because he too, could not find the 2 emails with screen shots of gift card activities, sent in the morning. I replied his email with the attachments which he confirmed he received it. It was at that time he said May be Claudia had forwarded the earlier emails to her own account…. That just does not make any sense to me.

4) I finally coaxed out Claudia’s direct email address - if she is the FD manager as this gentleman said, even though Claudia told me this morning that she would need to talk to her superior on how to handle the refund, then there is no point for me to continue email with the general reception email account since nobody is capable to fix the error anyway…

5) It appears the hotel does know it took too much from my gift cards. They do not know how or even possible to refund the overcharged 145.83 euro back to gift card. Though of course he kept saying they would figure it out, eventually, may need to do a refund to the AMEX card on file…. So, if they go this route, I would suffer a second time because AMEX would subtract 6x pts on the credit…. I will end up lose 1K pts just to get my own money back…. What a ridiculous situation it is….

6) For properties only handle gift card payment only once or twice a year, and not with a direct entry system as described in Wiki, don’t attempt to use more than one gift card. Only use a gift card which balance is less than folio amount, it would then NOT give a chance for such stupid human error from happening. It really IS a stupid error. It is like you use 2 $100 bills to pay $130 yet the merchant take the $200 without giving you the change of $70….
With a direct entry Givex system, the chance of such error hapoens is much less due to the amount is shown on the screen on each step. The guest can also immediately check the gift card activity to make sure things are done right.
For the “other” processing method via sending an email request to Givex in the amount to redeem from the gift card, stupid error like this can easily happen when the person who sends the request does not calculate the correct amount to be redeemed…

I should have kept to my last conclusion that the 20% discount isn’t worth the headache in using these gift cards.

Happy

They need to know the noncompliance properties so they can do something about it, or at least they try. So in the long run we the customers can be less inconvenient when trying to use Marriott gift cards.

Below is a response I just got when I reported Moxy Berlin Airport did not accept gift card, and Givex rep claimed it was a nonparticipating property so nothing Givex could help. When Narriott gift card dept followed up in this, I gave the Marriott Gift Card rep the additional info of the claim of “nonparticipating location”, and voiced my concern why Marriott Gift Card allowed noncompliance of a brand which was clearly listed as participating the Narriott Gift Card program. Now almost 10 days later I received this second follow up, which seemed somewhat promising, in the future…

Quoted belowI apologize that Givex representative gave you wrong information, we have forwarded that to our contact so that they may educate that representative.

All hotels listed under the participating brands, of which the Moxy hotels are one of, participate in the Marriott GiftCard program. There are no exceptions as this is a Brand Requirement.

I have also forwarded this information to the Moxy Berlin Airport Management.

Regards,

Kammi D.

Guest Services, Marriott Gift Cards

910 West Legacy Center Way, Suite 100

Midvale, Utah 84047

801-468-4167 Opt 3 (O) |

*number is not a #800. Long distance charges may apply

So while reporting to Marriott Gift Card may not resolve the immediate issue, but hopefully it would facilitate changes down the road. Marriott has a vested interest to make the gift card program work as it essentially I are orepaid hotel stays for future use.