Segments

From your Marriott account Overview page, click "Nights" (word below your ytd nights total). Will open to a pop up showing nights details including LT status, LT nights and LT points.

X-ON

Fair point, however a minimum requirement for an auditable account is that your
account balance, i. e. the trajectory from the inception of the account should imply your current balance. Especially if you choose lifetime point accumulation as a variable to determine lifetime tier. Then a necessary but not sufficient requirement is that you should be able to trace said point accumulation for all members since the inception of the account. You could of course redefine lifetime as starting from where you have reliable observations, not very fair, but it certainly does the trick. Or you could drop it altogether as variable to determine lifetime tier... Which is what I would do, save money and potential discrunteld old time members like yours truly....

I agree that Lifetime dollars spent is fair metric, kind of like a dollar weighted night count... Maybe a combination of lifetime dollar and nights... Got to throw the RI and 4P road warriors a bone

Oxon Flyer

It's one way, but certainly not 'fair', as it favours members who have paid and stayed in high-price (typically 'first world') regions. Anyone based in an emerging economy could have spent a greater proportion of their income and have double the stays and nights and could still be worse off when it comes to lifetime.

Finding a fair equivalence between a US-centric program like MR with the more global SPG is going to be an interesting challenge.

CPRich

You can only claim missing stays for 6 months, so any records older than that aren't really needed. After 6 months they can be deemed to be accurate.

I doubt frequent-stay points are subject to any federal/legal retention policies, so trying to argue it's an "auditable account", as if there's some Sarbox/HIPPA/etc requirement to go back to program inception isn't going to go very far.

Our company policy is to delete/destroy any records older than 2 years that don't have a retention requirement. Less discovery exposure, etc.

CPRich

Yes, let's base how important a customer is to a company by an index-adjusted measure of spend capacity. SPG shouldn't give any discounts to IBM, with the world's largest travel expenditure, for the millions and millions spent at SPG each year. They should instead fawn over Joe and his 2-man copy shop that doesn't make a lot of money but had to go on the trips to a Four Points last year.

controller1

Yes, you can always go to extremes, but somehow I don't think Joe and his 2-man copy shop with their six nights per year at Four Points is going to be advantaged over the IBM traveller with his 125 nights per year at Westin and Sheraton.

X-ON

I think you misunderstood or I was unclear:

I was not making a legal argument; I simply mean that if you choose a certain variable to track lifetime nights a highly desired criterion is that said variable can be tracked on all the members’ accounts. If that’s not the case why choose it as lifetime tracking variable? Or as I mention redefine the concept of "lifetime". Obviously SPG manage to track nights pretty accurately

Lifetime nights pertains to accurate and already registered nights which by definition would stretch back more than 6 months , my concern was that these accurate and valid nights was not correctly reflected in the history in a subset of the accounts, due to legacy issues like change of account systems etc.

I am sure that data retention policy and regulation differ from industry to industry and I am pretty sure that in the hospitality industry those rules are not that strict as for instance for financial institutions like banks.

But now I am feeling like I am sliding off topic ...

X-ON

Ok the story pertaining to the missing activity in my account goes on ....have not heard back from SPG until today and I got a call on my cell from one CSR that I have dealt with on this issue since a week ago telling me that "The development team need more time ... so she would get back to me by next week" ... So apparently SPG are taking my request seriously and they are trying to retrieve the data or confirm that the data points are actually gone ...anyway time will tell ... the story goes on ...

yosithezet

My charger seems to have made it to Singapore, but due to all my travel, and inability to retrieve it, was sent back. Or was that the chocolates?

dtremit

True, but:

• 2 million points is pretty easy to achieve, particularly given the credit cards, the higher number of points promos at Marriott, and the lower value of Marriott points.
• By contrast, 10 years as PLT is pretty hard to get -- at a minimum, it means every SPG LTP has been a member for ten years (and most probably for 15 or more). A true road warrior spending 40 weeks a year in hotels, and putting that on the MR card, could achieve LTP in less than three years.
• The MR credit card also makes a big difference in night counts. Someone who spends 30k a year on the SPG card for 5 years ends up with 25 nights from it; someone who spends that amount on the MR card ends up with 125.

dtremit

Which -- for those of you also having trouble finding it -- can be displayed by clicking on the word "Nights" under your YTD total.

margarita girl

As posted in another thread:

Canada101

I agree with you 100%.

What I mean is that what we know today as the Platinum "tier" may not be what the tiers are in future. Just as Marriott has established the 3:1 MR:SPG points exchange rate, there will have to be some type of reconciliation and mapping that takes place that "equalize" tier status for both MR and SPG program members.

In addition to the very legitimate points you raise, I would think there is also the issue of the merging of MR and SPG LT stats which would, presumably, result in some members who have been only "somewhat" active in both programs, instantly hitting LT status when the LT stats (whatever they are and however they're defined) are added together. How would they manage and continue to incentivize those members who instantaneously become LT Silver Elite and so on? It would seem to me that one potential solution is "the next big thing" or the creation of another aspirational tier that exceeds the current LT Plat level? Perhaps?

X-ON

Agree 100% with the above statements.
One comment though; one thing that MR and SPG have in common is that it is very focused on the NA market, in the sense that if you are located in these market you have much more non-hotel related points/nights earning possibilities via credit cards etc.
Historically speaking this made perfect sense of course, however with the ambition to grow the business in Europe and Asia I think that it would be a desirable feature if MPG could be made more location neutral.

How to achieve this?
One way could be to relate tiers (lifetime and otherwise) to where you are located, many airlines used to do this.
This is of course not without problem since it can be abused.
I remember when you got *alliance Gold with SK if you had a Norwegian address with 25K miles (or something similar) of course I put my friends address (which was working in OSL) and fast track to *alliance Gold... No system is perfect...but SK I guess managed to attract more Norwegian business...

uxb

That's sad.

Thanks for the re-post.