$26 buys you four months of both Marriott Platinum and Hilton Gold if you’re in China – and challenges to keep the status for at least another year.
Alibaba is China’s Amazon + eBay + PayPal. Their online travel site is Fliggy, which has six elite tiers in its loyalty program. Members at tiers 4-6 get Marriptt Platinum and Hilton gold elite status challenges. A reader writes,
There is a partner-sanctioned route here that prices access to Marriott Bonvoy Platinum at RMB 188 (about US$25) for roughly four months, and it comes with an eight-night challenge that pushes Platinum out by about a year or more. The same purchase also includes Hilton Honors Gold on a similar four-month clock, with an eight-night path to extend as well. This isn’t a gray-market reseller; it sits inside the official partner ecosystem via Fliggy, Alibaba’s travel platform.
In the past, you could manufacture “F4” status for $10 – $20. And there were reports last summer at some Marriott hotels that 75% of check-ins were by Platinum members or higher.
Right now, Fliggy will sell you F4 status for 188 RMB for about $26.
- People generating unearned status
- Bonvoy elites no longer have an incentive to stay to requalify for status since they can just buy it cheap. They can even merge the new account they create for this with their existing one.
- And the benefits get diluted for ‘legitimate’ members.
Interestingly, the image headline here says: “万豪120天向金卡体验” which I believe translats to “Marriott 120-day Gold Card Trial.” But this is a Platinum offer, not Gold. The black card pictured has “尊贵白金卡” which means “Prestigious Platinum Card” and benefits listed (free breakfast, room upgrade, 4pm checkout) match Bonvoy Platinum. Those are going to be some busy hotel club lounges and breakfast restaurants!
Executive Lounge, JW Marriott Shanghai at Tomorrow Square, Credit: Marriott
Marriott sees they’re getting plenty of new signups through Fliggy, when they’re getting plenty of short-term elites – and the same members are often opening new accounts over and over as well. Plus, the status is aimed at the Chinese market – but it follows guests everywhere they go
I’ve always said you never want to enter the Chinese consumer market unless you are really sure you know what you’re doing, and only then with local partners with a real investment who know what they are doing.
The Chinese text above reads “Marriott 120-day Platinum Card Experience.” Because the character 白 was written in a stylized font, the translator misread it as the different character 向. It actually says “Platinum Card.”
I’d rather they provide a room with a built-in (non-local) VPN…and “real” bacon for breakfast.
On a mostly unrelated note, in 2011 I stayed at a hotel in Changzhou (Jiangsu province). My laptop had just gone kaput, so I inquired if the hotel would be able to lend me a device. Sure enough, 45 minutes after checking-in, some staff brought in a desktop.
It didn’t really matter if it was bugged, because I couldn’t check email anyway. Most likely, I just used youku to begrudgingly watch Under Siege and Under Siege 2.
The problem must be “translats” instead of “translates”. The company Translats is an official forwarding agent on the Latvian and Lithuanian railroads and is a member of the Latvian Association of Freight Forwarders.
Unfortunately currently the Chinese culture for domestic competition is not to make money but to flood the market hoping that your competitors would die. The rationale is that once they all died, the market would be left to just yourself. I can understand why the Marriott management in China is hesitant to do anything about the situation.
That’s what Xi said…
In my experience, Marriott has 2 real loyalty tiers: Titanium (translates to basic loyalty, intro benefits) and Ambassador (the only “elite” tier). Everything below Titanium can be easily bought, so everyone already has it, making them less like loyalty tiers and more like a very complex booking system.
I was in China recently and unfortunatley the exec lounges are very crowded with chinese who apparently got this status.so easily. AsTitanium who stays 75 nights a year this was a big disappointment. Marriott has devalued status so much. The Jw marriott in beijing wss a little better than the others I tried. Worst was the Shanghai Marriott Yangpu which is a new an dmodern hotel. But unfortunatley there it seemed that 80% of guests had exec lounge access. I was told there was a promotion in china for them:)
I moved to a hyatt in Shanghai and at least there I felt my Globalist status at the exec lounge had value. So from now on Marriott will be a second tier choice.
China is Marriott’s second largest market – they now have over 500 hotels there. I assume that at this point Marriott is not naive about the China market, so one would have to assume they fully understand they are giving away platinum status for $25.
The travel rewards space in China is growing very rapidly but still a long way behind the US level. Most travel in China is still booked on OTAs by non-members. I suppose this is an attempt to provide more leads to hotels to compensate for the costs of utilizing the brand.
Note also the ADR of hotels in China is a lot lower than in the US, maybe something like 3x lower. And most Chinese hotel rates also include breakfast. So the opportunity cost of a modest upgrade plus a crappy lounge spread is not particularly high for most hotels in China.
Marriott seems to want the business as China has a large enough population able to afford international travel and even more able to afford Chinese Marriott hotels. And by ballooning the elite pool, Marriott gives its hotels even more cover for cutting back on delivering elite status benefits — thus all this “today we have 100+n Titanium members, x dozen Platinum members, y Gold members” and so on to reduce customer expectations by nook or by crook.
@GUWonder within China, at least in my experience, it isn’t (yet) like in the US where $700 coupon book members have completely overrun all the Bonvoy properties. Most guests in China are still not loyalty members and there are no non-scammy points/credit card shortcuts. So there is still room to increase elites without overloading the lounges.
The places this really screws are popular Asian tourist destinations frequented by Chinese, such as Thailand, where the relatively more sophisticated Chinese guests ARE likely to take advantage of promos like this and also compete against the hordes of American coupon book holders.
Andrew M’s comment aligns with my own experiences in China and other areas in Asia popular with mainland Chinese tourists during last year and this. My experiences at mainland China hotels with hotel elite status has been quite good.
It’s always worth paying attention to the Chinese miles and points world for both legitimate opportunities and to also see what questionable stuff is going on around the world.
I’ve heard that Fliggy and Marriott have a joint venture, and that there are issues of corruption and collusion among some of its employees. They’ve deliberately tolerated the over-issuance of Marriott Platinum status and run extremely aggressive promotions because the company’s incentives are so high. In other words, the JV’s employees don’t feel accountable to Marriott International, and they don’t care if Marriott’s global loyalty program collapses—they’re only chasing short-term gains. I wonder what Marriott headquarters makes of this.