I agree with you. If they really can do this now, it greatly dilutes the 48 Hour Guarantee. At a minimum and to provide greater transparency, at the beginning of the year, a property should be forced to spell out on what dates the Guarantee will not be honored, and the name of the special event; i.e. Super Bowl, College Bowl game, NBA Finals, Final 4, etc. The dates for many, but not all, of certain "special events" are known well in advance. On the other hand, I do understand the hotel's position. If a hotel has 200 rooms, and 4 months in advance someone wants to rent all 200 rooms (not 199) for a large wedding party, if I am the manager I am going to politely encourage you to go elsewhere so I don't even risk losing the wedding party. Another way to cut down on shenigans would be to require the property to provide you with a cash voucher of some type for a stay at another Marriott if there is one reasonably nearby. Or perhaps the hotel should be required to follow the policy used when you are "walked" and your reservation is not honored. Remember, as far as I can tell from the number of posts here, complaints such as the OP's don't seem to be that common. Hence, the financial cost to a property for following either my above suggestions would not be great, especially since the offending hotel would supposedly be full and taking in a substantial amount of revenue due to the "special event". This would help reduce the ruffled feathers which occur when a supposed Guarantee truly turns out to be "supposed".

The only time i've heard of this being denied was after hurricane gustav went through louisiana. My coworker who is a platinum could not got a room anywhere near baton rouge. But this is understandable since a hurricane just went through the place.

There have been numerous threads on this board with descriptions of the guarantee being denied in a variety of circumstances. We are not privy to the degree of difficulty (if any) that an individual property faces when requesting of Marriott that the benefit be turned off.

Even the hotel didn't really know why this block had been put there... seems like an oddity. Anyway I sorted it out with them individually. Might have been turned off at some point as there is a local big football match in a city not that far away.

Thanks as always for the 'inside' scoop socrates.

I'm sorry but this just isn't the case

There are financial costs to walking Club Marquis (did that for you old timers :)) err I mean Elite members...not sure of the current costs but the old days it was 2 free standard rooms anywhere in the system, could be Italy - could be Maui etc in addition to a nice sized check.....those vouchers certainly added up quickly, about 15 years ago I did have someone use both of them in Rome, I think we were billed $300/night so all in all it could easily cost around $1K to walk a platinum member

+1...when i worked for marriott, the only time we were allowed to NMQ (no marquis overrides) was during Princeton University's graduation when people literally booked rooms a year ahead or more! (not IN the system, but we had SOME sort of manual system where we would record the info and CC---then as soon as MARSHA opened, we'd put them in.....we made 'em pay!!)

I don't think we ever walked a Plat.....we'd rather walk ANYTHING but.....and the bosses didn't leave that decision up to us.....I think the FOM, RM or GM told us what to do................

:) NMQ'ing is bad but Platinum's can still override it...I believe you're thinking of NPC (No Platinum Card)

anything but an elite/vip...and in the few times did happen I wanted to know in advance...we'd try to do everything possible to contact them before they arrived (note this is a very simple post, there are a lot of details which go into this and I could go on and on and on about it but would probably put most of you to sleep in no time)....but simple put there are times hotels loose control of their inventory at the last minute (sports playoffs come to mind...I've been hurt a few times by a long shot making it to them...but then I've also had the reverse happen too, a sure thing wasn't so sure)

This info is very useful....

I'd like to add that this has happened to me as well (being informed that the 48 hour guarantee was not valid as the hotel was 25% oversold) and that the hotel was just not taking reservations.

yeah...i think you're right................(it's been a while!:eek: and our Res Mgr-before the 'yield manager' term took over...was the one who did that....)

Shhhh...BUT i think maybe once we let someone in!!;))

Oh yeah! [or maybe when an overly aggressive res agent..NOT ME.....had us 25 over.....and we wound up perfect!)

ah those were the days!

Platinum override preventing second booking?
 

I got an interesting error today when booking my second reservation on the Marriott.com website for a LNF rate.

- *RESTRICTIONS - LIMIT 1 ROOM, PLATINUM AVAIL ALREADY INVOKED*

The funny thing is I could then log out of my Marriott account, select the room (at the lower rate, too), then log in when at the credit card step and make the reservation.

My guess would be that all the hotel rooms were either blocked or booked when you made your first reservation. Now, the hotel has probably released some rooms from the block and they are available to everyone.

If you think you might want to add yet another room for the night at some later time, you might want to make two reservations now, and then cancel your first one. That way your not using up your one Plat override room for that night.

But it is interesting to see just a little bit into how the Plat override works in Marriott's system. (I would guess that they didn't think about a situation where a Plat override was used, but then inventory was added back after that.)