News and notes from around the interweb:
- How to fall asleep in 120 seconds on a plane or anywhere else. My strategy is just to work every day through to exhaustion so when I close my eyes I am asleep immediately.
- China is destroying Palau tourism because the tiny nation maintains relations with Taiwan
- Why you should use your hotel room key to unlock your door before closing it when you leave the room.
- San Francisco fines Uber instead of issuing tickets to drivers, and Uber deducts the money from driver pay. There’s no way for drivers to appeal, and the airport may be issuing invalid tickets for instance to drivers for failing to display Uber decals when those decals are on the vehicles. (Lyft eats the cost of these tickets.)
- Reminder about how the Marriott-United relationship has changed under the new program. United Golds will only get Marriott’s 25 night status instead of 50 night status. It will take Marriott 75 night status to receive United Silver as before, so all those Starwood Platinums who stayed fewer nights but got United Silver via Marriott status match will lose it next year.
- Drunk groom in tinkerbell dress taken off flight after threatening to cut everyone up. Ryanair, natch.
- Getting connected to locals for a meal in their home when you travel (HT: Kalil D.)
All these Marriott devaluations means that once my Marriott points are used up, I’m no longer loyal to Marriott. They really screwed up, bad. From the travel package fiasco to the constant devaluations, they’ve managed to make the program the worst in the business. They somehow created a program that is worse than Marriott’s old program while destroying SPG and ripping off their most loyal customers with the category 6 and 8 travel package debacle. After my Marriott points are used up, I’m definitely staying away from Marriott in the future. They certainly think that they are too big to fail, which is never a good thing for customers or the industry. The merger should never have been approved and I really wish that we could get the government to break up Marriott SPG.
Don’t know why everyone’s so upset with Marriott. It’s just doing what has been done in other industries. Buy out the comp, create a monopoly, and then screw the customers
Yeah…the United Gold status match was the one reason I kept booking Marriott when I had cheaper options available. No longer. After this year, I’m a free agent again.
+1 @747always.
The “outrage” over the travel packages is ridiculous – Marriott sent an email at least a week before the changes to warn you to take action on any certificates in your account by attaching your certificates to a reservation before the deadline. People who didn’t bet that Marriott was going to exchange them for tens of thousands of points per night or that they would convert to new, higher levels. They lost, now they are pissed.
What a bunch of over entitled crybabies. I’ve been a Marriott LT Plat for 15+ years – I’ve always been well taken care of and I think for the most part, Marriott did it mostly right.
Are there hiccups? Of course – that happens in IT cut-overs. Is it the end of the world that you got hundreds of thousands of airline miles from a hotel program that basically threw in a seven night stay for free somewhere? Of course not.
@kevin
Month(s) ago I purchased a cat 8 with a United bonus 157k miles, I did not know where I was going to use it, so it stayed in the sock drawer, now it’s worth so much less before the years expiration.
People are angry for the lack of transparency (how they would map out) a 30 day blackout period, that’s less time certs are food for and the whole 30k extre points that cat 8’s/6’s payed for, Marriott fixed all of it within 48 hours AFTER extreme backlash, they could’ve done this in the beginning saved lots of negativity from customers.