Serious problems with Marriott.com website update
 

Okay, so now they want to use your email address rather than your user name. So, I used my user name last night. I forgot my password (my browser kept track of it) and now, I'm always redirected to a "session expired" page. I can't even tell marriott.com to forget me as a user so that I can even see any of the information pages about hotels. The button is there but it doesn't work.

I had to read about a hotel using the google cache this morning!!!

There is a very easy work around for this. You have to close all instances of IE 7 and then start IE 7 again and proceed to their web site.

But you are absolutely correct, they did not test this properly.

The problem: After siging into Marriott.com if you let your session go unattended for a period of time it automatically logs you out. It then provides you a logon screen, which even when you use a correct password doesn't work. The really bad thing is that you cannot go to any other part of Marriott's site, because it just sends you back to this expired sesssion logon screen (that doesn't work).

Relax, there is a real design problem. Look at at several of the other posts in this thread for details. You can get stuck on their session expired page. For what it's worth, I visit about 10-20 software development teams a year, helping them with testing issues, and I can think of only a handful that would let this sort of a glitch get past them. It's something that Marriott needs to work on.

Better yet, use Firefox.

IMHO, Marriott's roll-out of their website went better than Starwood's.

Marriott Concierge - Please help with reporting Web Site Problems
 

Chris please pass along these problems to your IT folks. I spoke with Platinum Guest Services, Reservations and Internet Support. The first two were of no help; Guest Services didn't even have a number for Internet support. The person I spoke with at Internet Support provided the pat answer "delete your cookies" and was not at all interested in taking a trouble report so IT could fix the problem. I asked to speak with her supervisor and she said her supervisor was not there and took my name and number and asked what her supervisor should do. Geez! I asked her to ask her supervisor to contact me at the phone number I provided. She said they don't call people, they only email. :mad:

I then called Mr. Marriott's office and spoke with a nice lady there who was able to provide me the phone number of a former coworker who heads up you IT performance area. I called him and left a message for him to give me a call. Ironically, when we worked together I headed up the IV&V testing for our software products.


OK, the problems so far:

1) After signing onto Marriott.com and after a period of inactivity your session will time out. When the session times out and you try to navigate anywhere on Marriott.com a Session Timed Out web page is displayed that provides a field to enter your password so you can log back in. Good idea, but unfortunately it does not work. Attempts to sign-in or clicking on any link (including the Clear Remembered User link) on the page results in the same Session Expired Window being re-displayed. Now there are 3 links on the Session Timed Out web page that do work; Gift Cards, Travel Agents, and Shop Marriott but that is it. The only way to get back to a useable Marriott.com is to close al instances of IE 7.0 where Marriott web pages have been accessed or delete one's cookies. The later is not a good solution for many of us as we use cookies to automatically log us on to the dozens of web site we visit, so doing so results in even more frustration of having to also logon to web sites other than Marriott.com. Obviously terminating IE 7.0 instances can cause problems too if we have other vendors' internet sessions active on tabs of the closed instance as we will have to navigate back to those sites. The bottom line is that it is obvious that this Session Timed Out web page does not work as designed, and it wasn't tested.

2) The new feature on the My Marriott Rewards Account - Upcoming Reservations web page shown below for reward reservations:

I called Guest Services yesterday and had the three cat 6 certificates applied to my January 3-week Award stay. They attached those 3 certificates to my Award reservation. The certificates immediately disappeared form my Unused Certificates section on the My Marriott Rewards Account - Upcoming Reservations web page but the following notation remained associated with my reservation:

The Guest Services representative said it would take overnight for the changes to be reflected in my reservation. Well I checked again this morning and nothing had changed:

I sure hope another 3 certificates are not ordered for this reservation 7 days prior to my stay. I called Guest Services again today and they said that the certificates are in fact connected to my reservation despite the above notation to the contrary. The question is what data does the Auto-Ordering feature key off of? I am not getting warm and fuzzies here.

The IT folks really need to work on their implementation of this and do further testing. If they don't I can see all kinds of potential ill-will and headaches down the road.


3) On the My Marriott Rewards Account - Marriott Rewards Account Activity web page under the Current Account Summary section it shows Nights Credited Toward Elite Membership as 74 with Additional Nights Needed to Renew as 16. On the Home page and also on the Marriott Rewards page it shows Nights this year to be 59 (this is correct). My guess is that on the Current Account Summary page they are adding in the 15 Marriott Rewards Premier Visa nights again.


Chris, it is fairly obvious that once again the testing of changes to the Marriott.com web site were minimal at best. The session expired scenario wasn't tested at all. We went down this path a year or so ago. You think the IT folks would have improved their IV&V testing after the last go round. Do the same thing, get the same results. No changes to their testing procedures as best I can tell. At least they are living down to our expectations. Perhaps next time they will surprise us. Hopefully they can correct these sooner than the 6-9 months it took them to correct the IE 7.0 rendering issues.


Hopefully others will provide additional posts detailing issues they encounter with the new web site implementation. For others who post problems, it is very important that you be detailed as possible as every little bit of information helps. This goes for me too. In another thread I indicated that you had to close down all instances of IE 7.0 to be able to access Marriott.com. Another poster said you did not have to do that. I let my session time out and discovered that was in fact correct. IE 7.0 Instances that did not have pages open to Marriott.com do not have to be terminated in order to access Marriott.com correctly. It doesn't correct the problem of the Session Timed Out web page not working, but it does help in the temporary work around for us to be able to access Marriott.com and give them our business.

Same issue with Firefox. In Firefox I could resolve the issue by deleting all the marriott.com-related cookies. Since then I don't get into the timeout-loop anymore...

To make it even worse is easy ;)

Problems with the site were making me nuts all day yesterday. (I'm sure that this was the case for many people who simply didn't bother to post here.) No way to run a business. One of the many problems was that I got stuck on the "session expired" page for hours. Seems to be working better today though.

Thanks for the cookie-clearing trick
 

Even after a clean re-start of Firefox and putting in my new username, when I timed out it still put me in the infinite loop. Clearing the Marriott cookies is a lot easier than restarting the application.

It's a workaround, but I hope they have someone reading this forum (Chris?) and explains to the web developers how wrong their approach is ;)