to be clear...MI has made no public statement - I posted my personal view which unfortunately seems to be clouding the things even further

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ok maybe my fever isn't 100% gone yet....

(Deleted by poster)

MR has posted several times on Facebook that nothing has changed; they try to say the same on Marriott Insiders. I guess that counts as a public statement.
Their statement is so obviously not true that I'm really baffled what's going on.

The only debate was if suites are included and that was resolved years ago. "Best available room" is best available room, nothing confusing about that. I hope they are not trying to pass this massive change as a "clarification".

It doesn't surprise me that the Marriott social media team would delete any posts which prove that they have indeed changed their upgrade benefit language. It's a pretty shady practice and leaves me questioning their true intentions regarding this and EEO/BOGOs.

Their intentions? Maximizing revenue and profitability.
The current target of cost cutting is elite benefits. Just look at how many Plats had a hard time changing their Megabonus this time around.

To me, it appears that Arne Sorenson is targeting elite benefits as an excessively expensive cost center and is reducing elite benefits a little bit at a time in order to cut costs. That works until you lose a large chunk of your elite customers.

This one category upgrade is just another datapoint that MI is going for short term revenue without regard to elite customer retention.

There are a few Marriott properties that I love and will book in the future - JW Lima, Sonoma Ren, Eden Roc - but I will increasingly start looking at alternative hotel chains. Hyatt and Starwood fully cover my elite desires and I can maintain top status with each of those with 25 stays/yr. Since most of my stays are one night, I only need to do 50 nights to keep top tier with them vice 75 for Marriott.

Marriott in general was always pretty stingy about upgrades. Now they are killing elite benefits with a death of 1000 small cuts. I've been unhappy with reductions in benefits in the past and stuck with Marriott. But it's now at the point where other hotel programs are handily beating Marriott on elite treatment. Marriott's elite program is quickly morphing into another Priority Club, where elite benefits are poorly defined and murky at best.

My concern is that the trend of benefit reductions will not stop until there is significant negative impact on Marriott's bottom line.

But without PB and really good Plat upgrades in Asia - I got suite upgrades in a CP, and free breakfast at HI (plus a corner room).

Not really sure what Marriott is up to - I guess they might want to cut back something and then give them back as if they 'upgrade' their elite perks - like SAS cut on board Y service a while ago and now people are liking them like crazy because they start to serve free tea and coffee on board.

Ah - I have not seen either and since they've not made a comment here....

likely rewritten by their legal department = double talk

Has anyone asked them publicly on FB why they took the posts down? And actually put the links back up again?

Cheers.

I suspect that if one doesn't trust Marriott's intentions now, whatever answer they might give, you would probably question that as well. So I wouldn't expect them to really answer that question.

I'm not a FB person so I can't post. But I think it's a valid question that should be posted - why did they delete the links? People need to know that they did actually delete the links. That's the more important part. People can decide for themselves what it means, but the fact Marriott did it does lead one to a certain conclusion. BTW - Marriott could spin it as they have been to date.

And there's nothing that says a person can't repost the links if they have them, especially since the corp folk won't be on until Monday

Cheers.

Well, hey, Marriott has conditioned me to have low enough expectations that I now consider getting a guaranteed King Bed an upgrade.

Excluding hotels I deal with directly because of long term stays, I'm 2 of 6 for king beds and 0 for 6 on platinum welcome gift over the last 6 stays.

So how much $$ have you collected?

I think in 20 stays this year both with and without family my plat husband has gotten bed requests and arrival gift on all. I'd like to collect hte $$ myself!