username

As someone who is addicted to the United 1K status, I can totally understand those who want status. Hotel status is not as big as airline status but I can totally understand. In a way, having these statuses makes "life" easier. However, I think it is an addiction.

KRSW

I dropped a note to their offices a few months before the IT pseudo-merger in August about just how poor the website had become and how badly call center times (and service) had become, and pointed them to several FT threads. I didn't even bother with points not posting & MR issues.

In the e-mail I mentioned that no reply was necessary; I really wanted the execs to see what life is like for the customer rather than just hearing whatever department heads had to say about things. There's a company wherein the CEO hasn't set foot in one of their properties in over a decade and goes solely by what he's told by his managerial staff. His name is Eddie Lampert. The company? K-Mart/Sears. We all see how well that's working out for him. Marriott isn't going to be filing bankruptcy anytime soon. BUT, if this keeps up, business travelers will eventually go for greener pastures, leaving the leisure market to Marriott.

I actually have seen variability by user. I handle the travel bookings for my office, so I'm managing multiple accounts. and yes, I've seen it where the Marriott.com site (and even SPG.com site) behave differently for different users. Even the posting of points for the exact same dates at the exact same hotel have posted at different times, sometimes not even posted for different users.

I had issues with booking hotels many times this year before before 8/18 (Never Forget™) and have had them since then. I have multiple computers in my office, each running on different OSs (Win/OSX/Linux) and still experience problems. When I can't book a hotel, I'll wait 30 mins, try again. If that fails, I'll usually head over to Hilton.com, where 100% of the bookings I've attempted to make this year went through, no fuss, no muss. Time is money. How much do you bill per hour? How much is it worth to you? I'm not going to spend 45 minutes on hold with Marriott when I can go to a competitor's website and have a trouble-free experience.

In many ways, it's like buying a car. The car is the actual product you use (hotel). The dealership is what handles the servicing (Marriott.com). If you love the car, but the dealership you have to use sucks, it may not be worth using that brand of car, even if you like the car itself.

flying_geek

At this point SPG and whatever it will become is like a bad investment. Many of us put some effort, time and money into it and it feels hard to write it off. It's not unlike the stock you bought at too high a price - and one is torn between cutting losses or buying more at the now lower price - or the early round investment where the company has burnt through the money and now needs more - and you can either throw more money at it or cut your losses.

Much like with the examples above, deciding what to do is troublingly little based on facts and way more on emotion than it should be - at least it is so in my case - but it doesn't look like I am alone with this issue.

Without that history of previous "investments", I wouldn't be wasting a second thought on whether I should keep trying Starriott here or there - I'd be long gone. I wouldn't be wasting time complaining or writing forum posts in the morning.

I think there is a legitimate chance that Marriott's gamble will pay off - they cut benefits, take away anything remotely resembling customer service - and if they then just make it a little - just a little better again - most of us will probably indeed stay because otherwise we'd just have been too wrong with our investment.

GUWonder

chad75

Not a huge issue in the scheme of things but I really miss the room descriptions. The majority of SPG properties I looked at would have detailed descriptions of the room types. Now it is often just the room title and a generic photo - it use to be nice to be able to see what the difference was between say a Premier vs Deluxe is at a nicer view, bigger size etc, really difficult to make informed purchasing decisions. Also miss the restaurant menus that many properties had on the website as well.

Recently had an interesting quirk as well. Cancelled a stay, a few days later got an invite to check in online - ignored it - three days later got my invitation to check out and yesterday got my post stay survey. Didn't get charged so no damage done but quite bizarre. Tempted to fill in the survey and inform them that I found my stay so ethereal it was like I wasn't even there.

JBord

I don't think this is the gamble Marriott is taking...although there may be some cuts to the SPG experience to align with Marriott. I think a lot of what we see is a temporary situation, especially in terms of customer service. Over many years with Marriott, any time I've had a reason to call customer service, it's been excellent. Certainly they need to return to that level, although it may not be what SPG customers expect.

As far as benefit cuts, I think it's a bit of a give and take. Wins and losses. For example, I was still several million points away from making LT Silver with Marriott at the time of the merger. Now, I'm about 29 nights away from making LT Plat (formerly Marriott Gold). Huge win for me. There ARE some take aways though. Different changes affect different people, positively and negatively. One person being unhappy with "cuts" may not be material if the changes make 2 other people happier.

CLEguy

Did you have a negative lifetime points balance?

C17PSGR

And for some of us, it looks like we are having cuts to the Marriott experience to align with SPG! It's all a matter of perspective.

But does seem like they are out of touch, although I presume the reservation system will be fixed. It's been a mess for months -- if you look, many of us were irritated that ORD provided hotels in Ordu Turkey but not near the Chicago airport! It's clear they have been making progress but seems like much of the work is being designed by someone who doesn't travel and the work is being done overseas by the lowest responsive bidder.

jpdx

Here's my Starriott experience of the day.

First, I have breakfast with a friend (at a JW club lounge, no less). He tells me that he's pretty happy with the Marriott app. Can even apply suite nights to reservations now. Say what? We look at all 12 of my upcoming reservations and not a single one has the SNA option. We have the exact same version of the app installed, and mine correctly shows the number of SNAs I have. Just can't do anything with them.

I then head back to my room to call the BRG line. Emailed to cancel two reservations a few days ago (conveniently, this now involves sending an email, because they no longer allow us to cancel them online). One email received a response within 3-4 hours, the other was ignored. Thankfully a friendly BRG agent picks up right away, cancels the reservation, and apologizes that email didn't receive a response.

While I wait on the phone, I try to make a reservation in Hong Kong. SPG website shows Courtyard, Sheraton, and Ovolo sold out, app has all of them available.

After dinner, the morning's SNA discussion comes back to mind -- I have several with Dec 2018 expiration left -- so I log in to the SPG website. I want to look at available options, and three legacy SPG hotels work just fine; I click "apply SNA" and it shows me available room types. Two Marriotts have a "SNAs can't be used for this reservation" message, and one yields "Unfortunately there's an issue displaying some of your reservations. Please check back later." Most maddening, a Sheraton reservation takes me to the dreaded eternal "Sign in or Join" loop when I want to start my upgrade request.

That's 45 minutes wasted on Starriott today -- with nothing accomplished. If I'd chosen to call about the SNA, it would have easily been another hour. And I bet even if I'd gotten a semi-competent agent, they couldn't have applied a SNA to the troubled reservations.

Not a horror, obviously (not my words anyways), but "slightly inconvenienced" does not adequately describe what's going on. Maybe we can agree on "well-oiled dumpster fire?" For reference, I made a Hyatt reservation this am in 30 seconds (imagine, the hotel immediately showed up on the search, and my corp rate was displayed without coaxing), and then sent a twitter request to have a suite award applied; I was slightly inconvenienced when the response that came within 5 minutes wasn't a confirmation that the upgrade had been processed, but rather a request to verify some personal information for security purposes. Still, even with that inconvenience, my suite was confirmed within 10 minutes. But I guess I must be mad for straying from Starriott.

JBord

Yikes! Somehow "several hundred thousand" became "several million" when it left my head. I was around 800k points I believe. LOL.

I don't disagree with any of that. They certainly have some problems to fix. But the incessant whining (in writing) about how Marriott is a horrible company that will never recover and will never be SPG is unfounded. Well, maybe not the last part. If they wanted to be SPG, the acquisition would have gone the other way.

It's perspective. If I can book a room, check-in, get my PPE benefits (really just care about the lounge), and get my points afterward, that's what I need. It's an inconvenience if I have trouble doing other things that aren't critical to my stay.

If that's a major inconvenience for you or a "dumpster fire", then you should book away until they get those issues fixed. That would not be mad, in your case. For me, not getting an upgrade is a shoulder shrug. If it's because of a technology error, it's an inconvenience. It's not a dumpster fire. I've spent hundreds of nights in regular rooms, the world doesn't end for me.

Again, you have to do what you have to do. But the vast majority of customers, like your friend, are not even experiencing inconveniences. I'm simply making the point that there's a lot of hyberbole here that is also being projected across Marriott's customer base, rather than acknowledging that (other than CS wait times) it probably impacts a certain number of elites that are very active within their accounts. Outside of us, looking in, it probably doesn't seem like much worse than any other large IT merger. It's certainly not getting the attention an airline does when they experience a system fail.

EuropeanPete

This is surely exactly the point. Speaking from my own experience, I can't always book the room I want, I usually don't get PPE benefits (though I don't care too much about a lounge) and have not got my points afterwards 50% of the time and customer services is either unavailable or unreliable when I'm made to escalate to them at the various points along the process. This is all far too difficult, and not sustainable.

JBord

Fair enough. It would be interesting to know how many people are experiencing this. Hard to tell from the 25 vocal people here on FT. We each can only speak of direct experiences. Mine have been fine so far, and I realize others have not. I still don't think things like not getting points on time or having to use the web instead of mobile are "a horror", but if I book a room and can't get it, or can't prove my status by showing the app at a hotel, those are problems. Not life and death, but annoying problems.

My first post-IT-merger stay at a SPG (Westin) tonight. As a member of both programs, but only high level elite at Marriott, it will be interesting to see how I'm recognized this evening when I check in, if I'll have lounge access, etc. If they don't recognize my PPE status, will showing them the app fix things? It doesn't matter to me much for this stay as it's a quick in and out and I won't even be using the lounge, but it's a good test since most of the problems seem to be happening to legacy SPG customers.

C17PSGR

You won't get PPE benefits at the Westin unless things have changed in the past couple of days. SPG uses Lightspeed which will only show you are a plat so they will lump you in with all the plats. Had three SPG stays in the past week at a Westin, a W, and a Sheraton ... none knew I was a PPE and none preupgraded me. At the W, the FD agent told me that she thought the hotel received a list of PPE in a different system but it was never given to them. At the Sheraton, they didn't know what PPE was. As a practical matter, that didn't have any impact on lounge access and my points all credited with the proper bonus. On the other hand, per the former SPG policy, all plats are lumped into the same upgrade pool so Bob, the notional sales guy who visits a customer twice a month, gets the same upgrade priority as Shannon who spends 125 nights a year in hotels. Of course, that's part of the reason Bob loves SPG! There is a poster who says SPG properties get a list of recommended priorities for upgrades daily but I've not seen any evidence of that.

But points keep posting appropriately. I was curious about the W since I had a lot of non-room spend but I received points using the more generous Marriott system for all spend rather than the less generous former SPG system.

The only issue is that it takes a couple of more clicks to get to an SPG property on the website and the SET/MR corporate rate codes don't easily translate.

transportprof

Just tried to check my reservations on the Marriott web site, and got the following message:

This doesn't sound like a stabilized platform to me,

C17PSGR

And ... that's been the banner there for weeks even though all my reservations show. I think the issue is fixed but they haven't taken the banner down.