Hope Your Right!
 

I hope your right! Really will benefit the road warriors actually staying in hotels for work!

Unfortunately, have to disagree with "SPG Plats are flooding Marriott" as I have yet to record a stay credit yet with Marriott Rewards until both programs are officially merge which I don't have to split my loyalty between the 2. I am only staying with SPG, so Marriott folks, no worries from me from taking up your upgrades or flooding Marriott lounges.

In 2017, as an SPG Plat matched to Marriott I've had only three stays with Marriott and only visited the lounge on two of those stays. By "visit" I mean that I stuck my head in each and decided to not stay due to the number of children running around in each lounge. Each lounge had at least ten (not kidding) children running around it and no place to sit.

I'd gladly take children over the cookie crumbs & dust I normally run across at 8pm after a long day of work...

Fascinating thread! Not sure where all the vitriol is coming from, albeit there are certainly a wide variety of opinions and perspectives. Personally, my history is 800+ SPG nights with 12 years as Pt, so obviously I'm SPG LTP. Used to be Hilton Diamond, for 20 years or so, but left when they started taking away benefits including suite upgrades. Don't really care about the rooms so much except when my wife travels with me, which now is most of the time since I am retired and we travel for pleasure roughly 60-70 % of the time. Have been staying at Marriott properties a bit of late since they are, as noted, quite a bit more prevalent. Over the years I have stayed at everything from Four Points & Fairfield to St. Regis, JW & Ritz Carlton; so pretty much agnostic from a hotel style and level of service perspective.

I have found both SPG and Marriott hotels and programs to be excellent, as I did the Hilton program. In fact, the 'best' hotel I have had experience with is the lowly Hilton Shinjuku in Tokyo where even after a 12 year hiatus the GM welcomed me when I walked through the door last fall and personally escorted me to the Executive Lounge for check in and made certain I got a room on the executive floor despite being booked in at the lowest available corporate rate! Having stayed in that hotel multiple times over the past 25 years the consistency of service and attention to detail still impresses. I'm probably a somewhat typical hotel traveler in that I look for the best price with the best accommodation to my taste, which means that domestically (USA) the hotel often doesn't matter since the service is generally rather plain, the lounges typically pretty cheapskate in their offerings, and the upgrades often limited by local management. Since I don't frequent the same locations particularly often I don't get 'special' treatment because the staff know me other than at my home airport where the closest hotel is a Sheraton and I can park throughout the duration of even my longest trips (sometimes u to 5 or 6 weeks) and where all the staff "KWIA" and I get a suite upgrade 99% of the time even when they are busy. Internationally, I generally go for the best hotel in town unless local transportation is a real headache, in which case location may play a role. As mentioned, I have always loved the suite upgrades at SPG and that was the major reason I remained loyal for so many years.

That said, my wife and I just returned from Europe where we stayed at the AC Milano and the Marriott Lisboa, both of whom upgraded us (a suite in Lisboa) and provided full breakfast for the two of us throughout our stays. Apparently this is not standard at the AC hotels, but the staff was very accommodating and helpful, and breakfast is an important amenity to my wife! And conversely, when we stayed at the Sheraton Times Square in July the service was terrible, the lounge was overrun with loud children undisciplined by either their parents or the staff, and we left the hotel as quickly as we could each morning after the quickest breakfast we could grab and did not bother with the evening lounge experience at all after the first day! The point here is that even as a loyal SPG aficionado I would not return to that hotel in a million years. And I have had wonderful experiences at Marriott properties of late as well.

I would say that on paper, at the least, it does appear that the SPG program offers slightly better amenities fitting to my particular tastes that the Marriott program, however in actual experience I have not seen much difference. And as others have pointed out, every hotel occasionally has its challenges so how those are handled is more important that whether they occur occasionally. In that sense I would again say that I have experience little difference between the attention from SPG staff and Marriott staff throughout the world.

So why am I posting to this thread? Simply to suggest that, in general the arguments seem to be generally specious, both programs are among the better ones available, and that neither chain of hotels is likely to be overrun with loyalists from the other. The challenge opportunities offered by both programs, while attractive to some, are sufficiently constrained as to both eligibility and requirements that the numbers who accept and meet them will be rather limited and unlikely to impact any of us in a significant manner. We all experience both our stays and our benefits in different ways and we all value different aspects of the various programs out there for all sorts of travel loyalty. Sobeit. Some arguments are petty and others critical in their impact on our lives, but we should always be able to separate personal from business, emotion from logic, and when appropriate agree to disagree and move on. I believe this thread has reached that point and hopefully we can all agree that both programs have the strengths and weaknesses, so let's go enjoy those plusses and encourage the companies to fix the isseus as they arise.

Have a happy 2018!

[MENTION=49659]CEB[/MENTION]

Great post!

And ... so far this year, I'm 5 for 5 in suite upgrades -- 3 from Marriott and 2 from SPG!

Hallelujah!! I'm glad I'm not the only one who realizes this.

Flyertalk tradition is to absolutely freak out whenever we sense that our program has some sort of fast track, challenge, comp, etc. to status - even if that's how we first got status ourselves.

There are tens of thousands of regular paid elite-guest-nights every night across any given chain. There is a minuscule number of comped/challenge elite nights - people who was just granted status but haven't yet stayed enough to earn it the "regular" way - each night. Of that minuscule number, nearly all of them are in situations where (a) they did not receive a suite or (b) they received a suite without blocking access to a suite by a "real" elite. Simply put, an SPG comped Plat with few lifetimes stays and points isn't getting suites ahead of SPG 100's/75's/50's. Not in any remotely well-run hotel.

The suite is really the only thing a comped elite *could* take away from you, and the odds of them doing it are like a million to one (or more?). Whenever we're in a crowded lounge, we tell ourselves "wow, I'm surrounded by all the comped elites", when it reality you're probably surrounded by regular business travelers just like you. If the comped elite doesn't start staying at an elite pace (thus becoming a "real" elite), then they simply aren't there enough to clog up the lounges or take your suites. If you run into someone who first discovered Marriott through United, or Starwood through Amex, so be it: that's what Marriott and SPG hope happens.

On my next Marriott and Starwood visits I'm going to get a bucket of water and pour it out when I go to the lounge. That will help prove the point that "Platinums are flooding the lounges."

Who wants to join me?

Duuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuude(?) .... let it GO

And is this post intended to mean that Starwood lounges are never crowded or overrun with rug rats?

Just a request on behalf of the all SPG members venturing into this forum to check out how things are working out following the merger, but finding that useful and interesting discussions are being flooded out by the same group of FT members handbagging each other in thread after thread.

It's not enlightening reading for the rest of us. Enough ?

There are a lot of interesting conversations to be had - new tiers, updating of benefits, future LT levels, discovery of "new" properties in favorite cities, etc. This is a big merger.

But when inflammatory & likely false threads like this exist, or you have certain posters unable to accept basic facts (like that SPG LT status will be honored going forward, which Marriott has publicly said and posted) and spreading fake news - what do you expect?

OK, but your SPG Gs have more then made up for your absence !!