Category Archives for Hotels.
A roundup of the most important stories of the day. I keep you up to date on the most interesting writings I find on other sites – the latest news and tips.
Here are four dining lessons from the air and from the ground that I learned over the past week: a recommendable restaurant, a good meal on a plane, and a former hotel favorite disappoints.
I’m as disappointed as anyone with the way Marriott has delivered on their new loyalty program. The technical side of combining Starwood and Marriott accounts has been frustrating — my account still isn’t right. Customer service has been poor — I’m waiting for a reply to an email from September. And most of all the delivery of benefits and redemptions hasn’t matched what was promised.
However that doesn’t mean you should abandon Marriott. In fact you shouldn’t. Here’s why.
Limited service hotels are a fast growing lodging segment. There’s no room service, for instance. Don’t expect a bellman or valet. Some ostensibly full service hotels are moving to become limited service, too.
The brand new Hyatt Regency Seattle opened December 10th. It’s across the street from the Hyatt Olive 8 and near the Grand Hyatt, and is the largest hotel in the Pacific Northwest with over 1200 rooms. And it does not provide daily housekeeping.
What happens when hotels change award categories without notice — right as members who have been waiting for months have been allowed to redeem? And how are some hotels ‘complying’ with Marriott’s elite breakfast benefits?
The problem I think is that the chain’s CEO describes the frustration of his best customers as noise around the edges rather than tackling the problem with open arms. Bill Marriott said the purpose of the Starwood acquisition was to give them scale and leverage. I noted at the time this included leverage over customers.
The road map for where Hilton has gone with their program was laid out by Jeff Diskin, now Hilton Executive Vice President, back in 2010.
He said the Honors program was giving too much basic value to members and it wasn’t generating enough value. They hadn’t been active with promotions. And that needed to flip. That’s exactly what’s happened.
Hyatt just announced several modest program changes to award members after fewer nights starting next year, and some tweaks to qualifying for elite status including requiring 5 extra nights to re-qualify for top tier status in 2020.
Here’s what’s changing and what they’ll mean to you.
A roundup of the most important stories of the day. I keep you up to date on the most interesting writings I find on other sites – the latest news and tips.
Marriott told us from the get go that their new top awards price of 60,000 points per night would last only until 2019 and that next year they’d start charging up to 100,000 points for their best redemptions with the introduction of a new category 8 along with low season and high season prices.
Marriott now says that category 8 will start in March and that the date for launching high and low season pricing is not yet known.
There are reasons to be skeptical that the breach took place in 2014, rather than there were records in the data warehouse which could have been taken that dated to 2014.
Regardless of what did or didn’t happen, and whom to blame, we’re clearly not getting the full story from Marriott. And since it’s our very sensitive personal information they failed to safeguard, we should be demanding it.
Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel -- a topic he has covered since 2002.
Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »
