I am a TE customer and get treated worse than a regular guest at my local inn by Marriot.

Sorry to hear about your troubles. I can only suggest you remain diligent and hopefully someone you come across has half a brain. FWIW, I have encountered some people in their customer service that I suspect were "not ok". These people have hung up on me as the didn't want to do anything about addressing my issues.

This is a great way to get your account frozen and lose all of your points.

Marriott is a total train wreck. I cancelled a cash booking well outside the cancellation period at The Richmond Virginia Marriott. They charged my credit card as a no-show. Hotel told me to call Bonvoy. Bonvoy told me it was the hotels problem. Back to Bonvoy. I explained what was going on they didn’t want to deal with it so simply hung up on me. I only have lifetime platinum status. I asked Amex for a charge back. Months later it was resolved. So unnecessary.

I've sent multiple emails to the mentioned email addressing my issues. What's funny is that you, Christina Z, responded back me to on a few occasions: April 7 and April 27, with the same response, "We have reached out to the appropriate team for an update. Once we have an update, we will let you know." It's been over a month since your initial response, is there an update you can follow up with me or would I still need to give the "appropriate team" more time for an update?

This was for a 3 night stay. (100k+85k+85k FNC)

It seems like even these lurkers here are now acting more like bots, giving people that have problems like you cookie cutter responses over and over.

Back in the day here Lurkers used to be good. Now they are just shills that do nothing.

It fails the legal definition as fraud generally requires an overt, affirmative statement. Generally, fraud cannot be implied unless there is a specific statute authorizing such. An example would be presenting a check. There are numerous civil and criminal laws about presenting knowingly presenting a bad check, however, it is important to understand that those laws generally don't apply if the check is postdated, i.e. a future promise to pay. A credit card which is say, over the limit today, but isn't supposed to be charged until a later day, presents no legal issues and certainly not fraud. The key takeaway is that the credit card guarantee, much like a postdated check, is for a future transaction which turns the transaction into a promissory note which takes it out of the fraud category and into a simple unpaid debt. The court's are loath to take a simple contract matter and have it resound in tort, e.g. fraud.

That being said, it would be of dubious ethics.

Geezuz. I'm slowly catching up on two years' worth of stuff in this forum... how many more tire fires are there like this?

It is not fraud if there is no payment due.

Freezing one's card on file seems especially prudent when redeeming a certificate or certificate plus points.

https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/marr...t-website.html

I was one the one that posted the longer thread on this topic.

1. Marriott did refund my wife the points purchased. However, Amex had also given her a fraud credit. As has been pointed out, I would not recommend contacting Amex/CCs that this is fraud since I think that Marriott will eventually figure it out (we didn't know that Marriott had pushed a charge through, 3 were outright rejected by Amex). The trick seems to be getting the case to the right person. My wife has notified Marriott that she now has 2 credits and is awaiting an update. Marriott did take back the 35,000 points.

2. Freezing the credit card when doing a point advance/point/cert booking is no issue at all since Marriott isn't supposed to charge anything at the time of booking.

3. Front line agents are not able to handle any of these types of issue since they read from a script. I'm not saying ignore them, but they are just going to read from a script that says points purchases are non-refundable. They don't really have a script that says, oh points purchases are refundable when there is an IT error, etc. It was a long call, but we did get the second Marriott agent to create a case.

I'm open to ideas on how customers are supposed to handle these types of issues that are IT issues. Should we use DM Marriott at Twitter, email the reps here? I'm not sure what the best solution is, but would love to hear it.

We are both long-time Marriott customers including Marriott Vacation Club (which is actually a different company now). Some of us just have to push threw this and come to a solution with Marriott even if it takes time. I'm not here to defend Marriott, but it isn't as simple as just go to a competitor for some of us depending on where we stay, etc.

Same thing happened to me. I’ve never had to charge-back to anyone in the world apart from Marriott. Always make sure to use AMEX or another higher end card when booking Marriotts as there is a non-negligible chance that the company will try to pass on a fraudulent expense which could easily be in the thousands of dollars.

What’s that saying? “Do not attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence” or something like that. Marriott isn’t out to rob its guests. They just have a broken IT system and they don’t care! Since the merger, I always take a defensive stance when dealing with Marriott. Take screenshots, keep spreadsheets, file all emails. Take the stance that you are dealing with a 3rd world company with really lousy IT and a mgmt team that couldn’t care less.

Not many individuals working for Marriott set out to rob their guests, but Marriott is knowingly in blatant contravention of a whole series of customer protection laws and knowingly loses what I assume are thousands of charge backs on a monthly basis representing just the tip of the iceberg of consumers they’ve defrauded.

AMEX will eventually take back the fraud credit. I would not even bother to contact either Marriott or AMEX when Marriott processed the refund. Every bank does Audit on fraud credit they issued, they will recognize the books subsequently. I have an IHG hotel charged me 5 months after a point stay. Hotel is in Italy. Could not get a person speaking English, as the only person who speaks English was on vacation each time I called. Filed dispute with Chase which issued a credit. Eventually IHG customer relation dept (based in Manila) got hold of the hotel which eventually issued a refund. A month later Chase sent me a postcard informing me the credit Chase issued is now reversed as Merchant had issued a refund.

I am sure AMEX would do the same given its system is more robust than Chase.

There is no need to freeze one's CC in making reservation if you do the workaround I described in other thread, and probably another thread prior to this on Cert not attached to booking nature. To me that is far easier than go thru the trouble to freeze and unfreeze one's CC. But of course YMMV. I have made 3x 3 certs bookings during this period that so many have issues, yet all my bookings using the work around method went thru without any drama.

It is almost like defensive driving, the workaround I figured out, is my defensive system not to be trapped by Marriott's crappy IT which I suspect will continue IF their IT functions remained outsourced (to China, as the IT works in final handling of SPG merger was done by programmers inside China ).

Here is what Amex says about the credits, so I do see your point "Any merchant credits that were received towards the fraudulent charges will be debited in order to avoid duplicate credits. Any debits would appear on an upcoming statement.".

However, the reason I had my wife proactively reach out to Marriott with the second credit is she has a 2 trips coming up in June. I don't want her to show up and fine that she can't check in because your account is under review, etc.

I'm sure this will all get sorted in the end. However, we still have to travel in June and need to have assurance that we aren't going to show up with an issue.