On paper, Marriott Bonvoy is probably the best large hotel loyalty program. It’s not as rich for elite members as World of Hyatt, but the chain is more than 5 times as large.

Since combining Marriott Rewards, Starwood Preferred Guest, and Ritz-Carlton Rewards into a single program, though, Bonvoy seems as though it’s primarily worried that someone, somewhere might be getting great valuable out of their membership. And so we have seen annual devaluation after devaluation, including the elimination of award charts, the removal of caps on how much free night awards might cost, and the introduction of blackout dates for legacy Starwood hotels.

But what’s most frustrating about Marriott Bonvoy is the extent that hotels seem to be allowed to flout the program, and rules of the chain itself.

Reader Z.L. shares the welcome message from the Marriott Courtyard Lake George, which explains that it explicitly will not honor Bonvoy elite food and beverage credits because their restaurant is operated by a third party.

In May the St. Regis Chicago played this game denying breakfast benefits to elites claiming they’d outsourced their restaurant and had no obligation to honor it. Then last month it was the Muir Autograph Collection in Halifax, Nova Scotia. In response to a guest complaint about the Muir, Marriott Customer service actually responded that there are no standards, “each hotel has its own policies and offerings.” While Marriott offers a cash guarantee for its elite benefits, the Muir simply said it had been exempted from that.

Marriott’s terms and conditions contain no exception to the breakfast benefit for situations where “the restaurant at the hotel is operated by a third party.” However,

1. terms and conditions don’t matter if Marriott won’t enforce them, and
   
2. in my experience, Marriott customer service invariably sides with hotels against the customer even when the customer is right.

Hotel owners want loyal customers from a hotel chain (what they sometimes call ‘leads’) but don’t want to deliver on the expectations the chain has created to build that loyalty. Marriott has been broadly allowing hotels to get away with this more and more, focused on owner costs rather than protecting their brand. They’ll often enforce brand standards when called out, though.

That’s a short-term mindset, because in the asset light model where hotel chains tend not to own their properties, all they have is their brand. They’re afraid of antagonizing owners in a way that costs them revenue in the short term, but that risks sacrificing even more revenue in the long term since the brand becomes the only thing of value that they have, the reasons customers book through their platform. Without a brand driving bookings, a booking platform has nothing else to offer.

The problem with Marriott is that they’ve kowtowed to owners for short term fees, while sacrificing the reputation that brings customers – and therefore value to owners. By allowing one property after another run roughshod over the published benefits of the program – by not proactively auditing and enforcing standards – Bonvoy remains valuable only on paper and not in practice. And that’s a hole right down the middle of Marriott’s strategy of infinite brands held together only a program that is anything but rock solid.