Happy

So I had a one night mattress run stay at a local Sheraton Suite. Despite I informed them I would use Marriott GC to pay for the stay, they still ran the full amount of the stay on the AMEX card as authorization. That was OK though annoying.

What is nutty is, the merchant's name shown on AMEX is - SHARITON SUITES FT LAUDERDALE.

I fail to understand how could the Merchant's name have such mistake. Should I mention this on the Survey email they sent after the stay? LOL. Oh, the Sheraton Club is AWFUL! It only served basic breakfast which when we arrived at 8:30, completely ran out of the only 2 hot items - egg and bacon, as well as OJ, cream cheese, and only 2 bagels left..

Of course the property is independently owned by an LLC which is again owned by another holding company which does start with SHERATON, not SHARITON. The property is a rather old property, probably exists as a Sheraton for close to 20 years, with the setting looks very much like an Embassy Suite.

DallasEsq

Maybe they have a separate entity for payment processing named Shariton.

ElevatorEnthusiast

I've had many payments processed at "Marriot" properties, according to Amex.

James Luckard

It opened in 1987 as an Embassy Suites.

It has an almost identical twin at Tampa Airport Westshore (recently downgraded to a Four Points), which is also a former Embassy Suites.

atsak

Amex has this happen in other industries I've noticed. Some pre-auths for one of the IT equipment distributors go through on my AMEX with a letter transposed in the name when they show in pending, then they get fixed when they post. I found it quite curious as well, I'm not sure what the purpose might be.

platbrownguy

This is very common with all kinds of merchants. 99% of the time it is just a simple typo made by one of the very many people who could have been involved in setting up the merchant services account potentially many years ago when it might even have involved paper forms in triplicate (or in this case, likely a phone call). No big deal and I wouldn't read anything into it at all. 1% of the time, maybe, sure the merchant sets up an alternative holding entity to receive revenue. Also nbd.

Happy

When people stayed at properties especially internationally, very often when the names do not carry the brand names as the program would recognize, the CC spend points received are regular spend without hotel stay extra. Happened enough in virtually every program and often resulted posts on Flyertalk.

SHLTP

I am running into a similar problem on the Hyatt side. The Hyatt in China I stayed at last week is written in pinyin (ie romanized version) of the Chinese name. It is called kaiyue rather than Hyatt.

I didn't get bonus points for Hyatt credit card spend so had to call from china back to chase and explain. They didn't get it. I probably spent more on the phone call than the bonus points would've been worth.

mahasamatman

It would have been free if you had used Google Voice (assuming you are eligible) or Skype (toll-free numbers are free for all).

Happy

I would use the Chase Secured Message function in the account, send them the folio PDF file that should have Hyatt's logo on the page. Explain it again that the name is in Chinese pinyin (or the sound as it pronounced), also a PNG file of how the hotel shows up on Hyatt site - this should convince whoever who read the SM. If the first rep did not get it, write back.

With Chase I tried to use SM to resolve issues as much as possible. If the first rep did not read or incompetent (totally misunderstood the question when I asked to move a several hundreds credit balance from one card to another card so it could be used to offset another card's billing, the first rep thought I was asking a balance transfer... He spent a long message to explain a balance transfer was not possible.... I replied back to point out the incompetence. The 2nd rep came back to apologize and did it as requested.