Category Archives for Hotels.
I’ve written in the past about the great auction values at Luxury Travel Diary, many of which seem to go for 30% – 70% off, probably because there just aren’t that many people bidding so you can scoop up bargains. Folks who already know about these auctions won’t like the added attention.
At the beginning of the week I spoke with Marriott’s Senior Vice President for Loyalty David Flueck for an update on the integration of Starwood accounts onto the Marriott IT platform as they launched their new loyalty program on August 18th.
I reached out to Marriott for another update on where things stand fixing issues.
Four years ago Orient-Express Hotels rebranded as Belmond. They had been licensing the name Orient-Express, and they found that while the name seemed familiar (because of the train) it wasn’t really associated with the chain and didn’t drive bookings. Although it’s not clear that Belmond served them better. Orient-Express is now an Accor brand. And Belmond is putting themselves up for sale. Accor could be a buyer, they’re trying to build the Orient-Express brand and could pick up twice as many hotels as their current 2025 goal and goodness knows they buy everything else. Hyatt is mentioned as a potential buyer, it’s hard to find too many hotel companies that have the resources to acquire a small luxury chain and for whom it would be worthwhile. Big players wouldn’t see three dozen hotels as moving…
Hilton has been running double points since May 1. Hilton usually runs double points, for instance they basically ran it all of 2016.
For some reason they weren’t ready to announce what their next promotion would be so at the end of July they extended double points through September 9.
Hilton has just come out with their end of year promo. They’ve used the extra time from that last extension to come up with something new.
On a scale of travel company IT integrations, Marriott’s new program launch didn’t go nearly as well as the largest travel program merger — American Airlines-US Airways — nor nearly as badly as the biggest debacle United-Continental.
While Marriott managed to get functionality up quickly to book reservations, even now 9 days later there are several lingering issues.
I spoke with David Flueck, Marriott’s Senior Vice President of Global Loyalty, to get a sense for where things stand — what bugs are still outstanding, and when we can expect those to be resolved.f
The new Marriott program rollout has been riddled with glitches. There are members who still show the wrong elite status, wrong lifetime status, and who still cannot merge accounts.
One interesting quirk of the transition that benefited members was discounted overwater villa award availability at the St. Regis Maldives.
The Star Alliance program Avianca LifeMiles has a hotel booking site that is really Rocketmiles. And they have a one-day triple miles offer (there’s only about 12 hours left). You can earn up to 36,000 miles per night.
A lot of people are unhappy with how Marriott is handling travel packages. Over the weekend Marriott shared the new chart for how legacy travel package certificates work in the new program.
Marriott listened to the feedback that came in quickly over the weekend and is already making an adjustment.
Starwood Preferred Guest has moved onto the Marriott IT platform. Marriott brought their system down on Saturday to transition everything over. (Loyalty programs always do these things on Saturdays for good reason.)
IT is hard, and things haven’t gone as smoothly as we would have hoped. Awards haven’t been redeemable at all properties, and for some it’s been sporadic. However for the most part systems are now largely functional on Monday afternoon. But not for members whose accounts have the wrong status.
Marriott’s new loyalty program has launched, but as of this writing they’re still working through the IT. They told us to expect things to be down throughout Saturday. If things work on Sunday I’ll be impressed.
Compared to what might have happened I still think that the new Marriott program is about the best we could possibly have hoped for or expected. It’s stapling some version of the Starwood elite program onto some version of the Marriott redemption program (‘the best of both worlds’) along with some devaluation of each.
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 »
