Are you sure about that? Have you been paying attention to all the issues going on with the merger?

You might want to read up on projection because you were the one that got triggered by a comment about corporate hypocrisy.

Some folks were able to downgrade cat8 to NC5 successfully with 30k refunds. Some agents are of knowledgeable than others. Just you need some HUCA.

Well I am sure that if Marriott don't deliver the Book of Mormons to SPG hotels, they would still have all these issues on the merger. That is because they involved completely different team of people and groups for co-ordination and implementation purposes.

Merger of any ICT systems is always very complicated and messy. Even with long known lead time, it is usually the last minute business decisions and requirements that cause major ICT issues on the migration day.

Nobody has gotten any meaningful response from that submission.

On the other hand, enough people have blazed the trail to get their issues resolved, for the most part. There are more than sufficient data points posted on this thread on how to get things done. All one needs to do is to read and learn.

It is up to you whether you want to put in more efforts and time to get what you want or passively wait for Marriott would eventually take care of you. The choice is yours.

You can certainly say "greed", others would say "maximise shareholder returns". It is practically the same word. After all, Marriott paid through the nose to buy Starwood, they have to maximise their returns somehow, not to mention they are a for-profit listed company.

I wouldn't be surprised that originally Marriott was thinking of being generous, but when all the bloggers and FT speculating the point windfall and they noticed that there is a lot of buy up of TPs, they realised that they will lose a lot of money by being generous. Someone from the top looked at numbers and decided to change the option in the last week causing such headaches for TP holders.

Of course the whole execution is bad but Marriott is far from alone on this. Major ICT issues on merger are very common. I would give them 2 months to sort out, as fortunately I do have the time for it.

They could, but they most obviously did not, so I find LDoc's sarcasm warranted and funny.

And undeniably (judging by the results) they allocated enough resources to mormonify SPG but not enough for a smooth merger, so…

Does anyone know if you did this but have to change the dates by a few days, is that possible, or does it cancel the certificate and need to be reissued?

Hi I’d like to share my experience downgrading my previously unattached, legacy category 6 travel package 7 night certificate to a new category 1-4 7 night certificate.
I called 1-801-468-4000 at 08:16 Eastern and said “Transfer reward points” at the first prompt and “something else” at the second and got through straight away.
I asked to “downgrade my legacy Category 6 7-night certificate code (870T) to the new category 1-4 7 night certificate (QP83) for 45,000 points and get a 30,000 point refund.” The agent successfully attached the QP83 to a new Category 4 booking for 7 nights. Entire process completed within 7 minutes.

Note: Agent said that QP80 would cost 75,000 points so I asked her to try QP83 which cost 45,000 points giving me a 30,000 point refund as per the announcement on the Marriott Insiders website.

so where i once thought i was in smooth sailing, now i ahve an issue with my old category 8 travel package

had a trip slated to start on Thursday Aug 30, so i attached a legacy 8 cert to my reservation and stopped paying attention to the conversion and mapping issues

it now looks like i will have to cancel my plans...the hotel that I want has moved to category 6, which my legacy 8 certificate will not be able to cover...i know there are data points on downgrading

but what about upgrading? its not ideal, but paying 30k points to move to a travel package that can take any category 6 hotel at least means that I wont have issues later on when rescheduling

but from wht i ve seen upgrading isnt an option...so what are my alternatives now?

The person to whom I was responding believes that Marriott is evil to its core. If that is the case, then why would you ever stay at one of their hotels again?

I believe that Marriott's execution of this merger has been a poorly-planned mess, but I do not believe there has been a long conspiracy to hose Travel Package users. The "done wrong" bit here is mostly hassle, inconvenience, and poor communication. I had an unattached certificate. I'll get to use it in the same hotel I was planning to use it in a month ago. They didn't publish the mapping because they were still having internal "oh crap, what do we do now?" meetings. Remember, they did publish all of the main terms and conditions of the program well in advance - and included a bunch of items designed to show generosity to the acquired customers from Starwood. Many of us would not have been surprised if Marriott/Starwood went to all dynamic award pricing, which could have quickly led to industry-wide devaluation of loyalty programs overall.

Incompetence means I'll stay away for a little while...do a couple Hilton stays, wait until the systems seem to be working. But if I felt that Marriott was some sort of sinister supervillain, I would not come back.