pinniped

This. I was never concerned that Marriott was going to void floaters. Not for a second. If I thought Marriott was seriously considering doing something that extreme, I would not be staying in their hotels to begin with.

Questions about mapping? Questions about whether they'd become points-based night-credits? Questions about expiration dates or online bookability? Sure...kind of wondered about all of those. But just having them disappear into the ether, along with a credit of a trivial amount of points in our accounts? No, I didn't worry about that.

Marriott has completely butchered the IT and customer support side of the merger, but their bigger-picture intent to treat members as fairly as possible seems genuine, IMHO.

Happy

Thanks Crimsona for the clarification.
So now we now the OC1-5 is converted to NC1-4 with QP83 code - that is for the 45K pts value. Same as Dr.Leo's successful conversion.
The lone DP of the OC6 converted to NC1-4 with 75K pts value is mine. That has a QP80 code. Very odd. Now with the promised 30K refund, we may never have another DP for the conversions on OC6, 8 and Tier 1-3.

Happy

If you do not see a floater cert in your account (both online and app are the same, except app would show the points attached to it), they your floater cert is lost.

Can you trace the events you have had on your cert?
Was the cert originally attached to a hotel reservation and later the reservation was canceled? If so the cert would be canceled and pts returned to your account - automatically.
Was your cert from long time ago that unfortunately had expired without your realizing it? Remote possibility but I have seen that happened to someone.

Happy

Yes, it is in the emails people who submitted their refund request per the instructions given by the Marriott Rewards Insider's posts on this forum as well as being conveyed to several bloggers who in turn published this, "hailed" Marriott finally listened - that is twist to divert the attention from the much more fundamental issues - because all the messes are created by Marriott itself who intentionally planned to fleece the customers - the whole situation smells like a deliberately planned scheme to defraud customers.

What is ironic is, in doing the PR Spin, Marriott management forgot to cover the important ground - that is to update its rank and file troops on the about face of the policy. So the social media team replied to the refund request with a PREPARED, CANNED Response to basically tell you Tough Luck sucker, your cert now is worthless. Those email responses were received by people as late as Aug 22.

Then there were some tone changed about "technical difficulties" not able to do it.

Finally a new damage control canned email is out late yesterday that no longer mentioned about not honoring the certs, blah blah blah.

The sequence of events - including all the miscommunication / no communication on how the certs would be handled, coupled with Marriott Rewards Insider's posts here and on Marriott Insider site - the OFFICIAL site managed by Marriott Reward itself - should be sufficient evidence for some remedial legal actions should the situation continues to deteriorate, especially for those who actually spent $$$$ to buy SPG pts on its last wide-publicized 35% bonus point sale offer.

Dont we forget, Starwood Lurker has told us that all floater certs would be converted to POINTS, more than once. He also has said that numerous times as early as in May, that "it should be clear now to everyone, from now on everything I said via any channels, has to be first approved by the Loyalty Team. So responses may take some time." All these little things when entered as evidences in a court of law, would not go unnoticed.

The malicious INTENT is what matters, and in this case, is NOT that hard to prove.,

skimthetrees

IME, the website account does not update immediately whereas the mobile app data does so, if you made a change, do not be immediately concerned if the change is not showing on the website until the website updates to match the account information in the mobile app.

COMike78

Marriott | Golden Rule
"We live by the#GoldenRule
Treating others like we’d like to be treated.
It has always been our guiding principle."

With friends like Marriott, who needs enemies?

Happy

Plus the full migration of the SPG properties to the new platform.

Right now, the desktop platforms are a MESS, not just for the account information, but the properties available. Apps were reportedly slightly better but still full of errors.

It is very clear that Marriott IT is NOT prepared for the final merger despite they pushed the date from Aug 1st to Aug 18th weekend. Something is behind the push to get the final merger done much earlier than what it had announced late last year on their investors meetings, that the 3 programs would remain separate thru 2018 and the final merger would happen early 2019 (already 9 months behind schedule).

Unfortunately, its IT teams simply are not up to the task, or Marriott is too cheap to beef up the IT resources to handle the crunch, coupled with the malicious intent to defraud a good number of customers who redeemed the Cat 6, 8 and Tier 1-3 - so now we have this humongous mess with no end in sight - not just related to the TP but actually affects bookings with both points and cash based on how the websites behave.

Here is even the log in issues affecting those of us using the same email address for both sites in the past. On Sunday when the supervisor told me to log out and log back in to see my point balance, when I logged back in I found myself on Marriott site but the Activity screen was clearly for SPG as I saw 2 point-conversion entries to convert the AMEX SPG earnings to 3x "points". After multiple attempts we decided to use Incognito to see if I could return to Marriott site. That worked and I saw what the supervisor had done, NOT in the Activity page, but on the side at the right.

Since weekend I can not log in my SPG account in regular browsing because now it would not recognize the existing SPG password which is different from the Marriott's. Or the site threw me to Marriott site but displayed the SPG logo - the tell-tall is the point balances as I have vastly different point balances in different programs. I purposely keep a good chunk of SPG pts in SPG account as I suspect we would not be able to book any SPG property for an extended time until the migration is stable. I dont want to be locked out from SPG properties should I need them as who knows when the migration would be completed. The memories of UA/CO merger and the US/AA merger are bad enough that I would not take chance.

As of now, the only way I can log in SPG now is thru Incognito window, but someone who had the same issue told me he could not even with incognito. Another person told me he could not log in EITHER his Marriott or SPG account. Worse, SPG site no longer recognize the existing SPG account numbers. But if you use the assigned new number, either it threw you to Marriott site or not recognizes your log in credential at all.
The common element is we have the same email address for both sites.

Apparently Marriott IT has never thought about this...

Marriott is LOSING many revenue bookings from many fronts - in particular the SPG elites and the road warriors who can not even see their upcoming trips in their accounts - why take the risk when there are Hiltons and may be Hyatts?

The poor decisions would come back to haunt Marriott. Would be interesting time when it comes to shareholders / investors meeting year end.

Counsellor

I was able to log into both the Marriott site and the SPG site. While on the Marriott site, I combined both accounts (which had been linked) under the Marriott account number. I then checked the history and found the Marriott transactions still showing, but a note that the SPG transactions would take a while to migrate.

When I then tried to log into the SPG site, I got no data but a note that the account had been merged.

The combined number of points in the combined/merged account seems about right, but I'm not sure the credit for my last SPG AMEX account statement has been included; I'll know better when the account shows the SPG transaction history as well.

Happy

super-mileage-fan

The certificates have been very frustrating on multiple levels.

I appreciate the info that people are providing, but please be patient.

The difficulties of merging the systems shouldn't be underestimated. I think they are doing a good job here.

I encourage Marriott to be a little more generous with the policies and refunds given for certificate holders. It's part of those one-time merger costs.

I made a reservation with a certificate in good-faith for a property months out, and due to unforeseen circumstances need to switch dates. Wish they would let me, but the property went up in category (or the certificate went down).

Happy

AMEX SPG pts transferred to SPG before July 29th or 30th have no issue as my husband's AMEX SPG statement was on Jul 26th and I was worried about it. He got all the points correctly. I promptly initiate a request to move all his balance to my account - that took the full 5 business days. His SPG account now has 7 pts, and we will let it die of natural death.

I dont want to combine my accounts just yet because as of now you can only book reward stay at SPG properties on SPG site. I dont want to lock myself out from this avenue. I also dont want my Marriott account has boatload of balance because I want to use the award booking without pts feature, so I can eventually use the crappy TP certs once and when they are finally become usable. If I have pts in Marriott account, even just over 50% to cover the reward booking, my experience has been, Marriott site would just TAKE the points. This eliminates my options.

When I could not log in my SPG account on Sunday when it was reported sites were up and running, I had a moment of panic because of my SPG balance. lol.

Happy

Correct.
Personally I only use the web but your experiences match with all my friends'.

It takes several hours to overnight before the web updated.
There are some areas on the web you could see the latest info - for example if pts refunded to your account, the home page would not show, but the side bar on the right side (new design on the web) would show.
Activity page would not show the real time line entries when it is in the defraud 5 items per page mode, changed it to ALL you will see it. At least that is the trick in the past.

Also for those who use mobile apps you need to download the new apps in order to see your account info displayed correctly.

rny321

My best guess for the new codes.

Cat 1-4 QP83 (Confirmed)

Cat 5 QP91 (Guess)

Cat 6 QP99 (Confirmed)

Cat 7 QP107 (Guess)

Cat 8 QP115 (Guess)

I am treating Happy's award QP80 75K as a special case and using QP83 45K which matches to the old Cat1-5 45K as the reference point.

Dr.Leo

This makes sense now. Thanks HAPPY for following up with this

pinniped

*sigh* People are emotional. I haven't read every bad experience or permutation of ways a member can possibly get screwed on a Travel Package. I know when two massive programs merge categories, FT is quickly going to find the sweet spots as well as the places where people got hosed the worst, and the people who got hosed are going to post and write emails about it.

Lest we forget, the floater Travel Package certs are a tiny part of this merger, yet one that has a high degree of programming complexity to it. It's quite likely that the software teams spent months planning for the "big" things and kept kicking TP-related user stories down the backlog as they resolved other bugs in testing. At the end of the day, this is all less important than merging our accounts, sorting out the new status tiers, converting all the points, getting Starwood hotels up and running in Marriott Rewards, etc. Travel nerds like us represent a tiny percentage of the base - we think the TP's are super-critical but 99% of the membership does not. (Hey, it's their loss. )

So my comment about intent is this: Marriott wanted (and still wants) to create a program that both SPG and Marriott fans think is fair. It isn't going to be perfect, but they clearly tried to get the big things right. If all of the SPG Ambassador members end up at Hyatt, that's a loss. If all of the Marriott members end up at Hilton, that's a loss. So they aimed for something that would keep both in the fold, and have at least designed something that should accomplish that. I do not believe Marriott ever intended to defraud Travel Package users - there simply isn't any upside for them to do that. Intentionally driving away a high-volume member over 30,000 points?

The reality is that the execution has been horrible. IT operations has been a hot mess and call center operations has been a raging tire fire. It's clear that Marriott didn't have any good answers on how to handle the floater certs and has improvised with the solution a lot of us hypothesized here, but got to a decision too late and hasn't communicated it well through the organization. It has a manual step to it (if you want a half-category refund), which is annoying. But I think "intent to defraud" is a little strong. It's more like "didn't plan this individual detail very well, and now it's messy."