Last month I wrote about Marriott cracking down on members whose spouses check into rooms they’ve booked. Bonvoy has been pushing hotels to report guests who try to share loyalty accounts. If your spouse is staying under your account to use your benefits, and let you earn the points, this could get you audited.
- I am often on the road, but will meet my family in a different city at the end of a trip. My wife wants to go somewhere that weekend, and doesn’t want to wait for my to fly home to then travel with them.
- Her flight might land first! Or mine might be delayed! So I add her name in advance to the booking.
- But this looks suspicious to Marriott. The ‘fraud meter’ is overindexed towards treating guests as suspicious.
Marriott is also worried about people selling their points, or accounts getting taken over with scammers redeeming free night awards and changing the names on reservations. The Bonvoy program is warning hotels to no longer make name changes on reservations.
- An internal document outlines that name changes on award stays are not to be handled directly by properties especially within 48 hours of check-in. Gifted award reservations (not in the member’s name) must have an “M8 code.”
- If a property is asked to change the name on a paid reservation, they should remove the loyalty number and require payment details from the new guest.
- Hotels should verify IDs and payment methods more rigorously when suspicious name changes or additions are requested.
- Members in the US and Canada must confirm certain reservation changes through a one-time passcode.
- Always confirm special rates (government, corporate, etc.) with valid documentation before check-in.
Fraud and the end of name changes
byu/pastaeater2000 inmarriott
There’s a lot of actual fraud, regardless of loyalty program. Marriott Bonvoy is no exception. Most of the fraud comes out of China, like Platinum status on sale for $20, leading to as many as 75% of guests in some Chinese Marriott properties having Platinum status.
Ever since the historic Marriott data breach seven years ago security people have trumped loyalty people.
- They’ve made it difficulty and risky to give award nights to friends and family, since you cannot do it online, they won’t do it over Twitter direct message anymore, and you can no longer change the primary name on a reservation after booking. Telephone agents frequently do the process wrong when you call.
- They’ve also limited how many times members are allowed to gift awards each year to just 5. Their best members, staying all the time for work and gifting free stays, are probably breaking the rules all the time and risking having their accounts closed.
And when your account goes under audit you’re stuck on the phone with them just to begin the process of an investigation that then takes a month and a half during which time they lock you out of your account. What are the odds the customers they do that to want to stay loyal customers?
It makes sense to try to limit the costs of fraud, but when it creates so much friction for your best members to try to do business with the brand the losses to the chain may, in the end, exceed the fraud savings. The optimal amount of fraud is not zero!
And of course, when it’s guests who are victims of fraud – like hotels forcing them to pay twice for their room or hotel foreign currency scams – the chain seems to evince little such concern.
Ah, the ‘shoot first, ask questions later’ method. Bonvoy’d, yet again!
Marriott/Bonvoy is shooting themselves in the foot with this move. There’s a lot of completion out there & Marriott-branded hotels are not what they once were.
Another reason I rarely even consider Marriott.
Marriott is just not worth the trouble, when I have other good options (Hyatt) I take them.
‘For a hotel that doesn’t flag you as a fraud for simple name-change, please consider Hyatt.’
@Matt — Am I doing this right? (I know, it’s not Delta, but I really enjoy your meme.)
@L737 — Your thoughts on the transposing of this meme?
Marriott: The Hertz of hotel chains.
I wonder if this is being applied the same way to paid reservations as it is to award reservations?
I also wonder if it’s exclusively about using someone else’s elite benefits or not… My wife and I often need to do this in order to use an expiring free night cert. It’s not about sharing benefits but rather about getting to use the certificate before it expires because, she’s traveling and I’m not.
I wonder if an effective way around this is to just not change the name on the reservation? Keep the name on the reservation as booked. The spouse/ family member checking-in early or on their own can tell the front desk “s/he is meeting me here later and is still in transit but we were hoping I would be able to check-in now using my card.”
This is what my wife and I usually do and have almost never gotten any pushback regardless of if it was a free night cert, cash, points rate.
Also, we coach a high school sports team and take the team to events across our state. She often doesn’t travel with the team but I still always book my coach room via her account while booking up to 3-4 of the team’s rooms via my account. That way we both get stay points & credit. I usually tell the front desk that I’m checking into X rooms under two different names/accounts. One being mine and the other being my wife. I usually say that either she’s still driving and will arrive later or I say that she got sick earlier in the day and couldn’t make the trip. I’ve never had any issues doing this and hope I won’t start. Our last names are different but our address info in our accounts is the same and I usually have the credit card on me that was used when making the booking. I wonder if Marriott corporate would object to this as “fraud” and unauthorized “sharing accounts.”
What a silly rule. As Gary says, one good test for a loyalty program is to see how they treat your loved ones.
@1990 I personally prefer it be Hilton but I’m a fan — Marriott is doing its best to make any brand work ha. Well done, @Matt should be proud!
Marriott has extra capacity to treat guests as potential fraudsters since they spend virtually no time monitoring the behavior of the hotel owners.
@NSX – I couldn’t agree more. Marriott aspires to become Hertz when they grow up!
Gary should just give his wife one of his ID’s for check in. If questions, she can say she is in the process of transgender treatment. haha
@derek — I imagine what you said was meant in-jest, but it was a form of hate speech.
You must know, or you should know, that you conflated identity theft (a crime) with transitioning. Not cool. Not even funny, really. Like, it’s a lame joke.
Unfortunately, such prejudices are being normalized, which is wrong and harmful to those vulnerable groups and others who may be ‘next’ under an increasingly fascistic regime.
I expect you (and others) to deflect (‘no, no, it was just joking about Gary,’ etc.)
For everyone else, please understand that in this era, where our government is trying to ‘eliminate’ vulnerable groups of people, this is actually dangerous. Stand up and speak out when you see it.
All human beings deserve dignity.
I think it’s ok for a hotel desk agent to verify that the address on the i.d. and the Bonvoy chase card both match what’s in the member profile. I manage my husband’s biz travel, including all rewards programs. I use his points all the time if I have to, say, go to a doctor appointment far away, and can’t drive back home the same night. We’ve also gifted overnight stays to family members who need an emergency hotel room to visit someone in a hospital in a city they don’t live near. Treating kindness as fraud is truly evil. Hubby is considering switching to Hilton – I believe they have a status tier match…
How is it that every retard in the world seems to work either for the world’s governments or Marriott? The most frequent travelers and the ones most likely to have these “flags” for legitimate reasons. I probably am in that same situation 10x per year, between delayed flights, two hotels in the same city with one at the convention center, meeting my family on the road, etc.
The whole spousal rule should be reevaluated. A membership should include both parties in the couple. Most likely they’re both paying the hotel bills, and should therefore receive the benefits.
As a 3000 night guest ,I’m seeing more and more hassles with my kids checking in early(dad will be here later )
Marriott now wants to run my kids CC when I’ve already checked in online. I also IM the hotel via the Marriott App.
Im Ambassador but now also Diamond at Hilton, who allows you to add a 2nd name to the reservation
If this continues my next 3000 nights will be at Hilton
@1990 I wouldn’t think to deflect with words like “it’s just a joke”. And like yourself I’d encourage others to try and avoid doing so.
That said my position is that nobody made you god almighty, “the supreme arbiter of acceptable jokes” or any other all encompassing title that also bestows on you the right or authority to dictate what is and isn’t acceptable or adheres to your own, unknown to anyone else, arbitrary approved speech.
Who cares if you don’t find something, obviously said tongue in cheek, which you yourself tacitly acknowledge and further evidenced by @dereks “haha”. Just coz you don’t like his brand of humour you somehow award yourself the authority to publicly chastise him, tell that person to check his speech and go on to make sure everyone knows how you expect them to behave & to do our best to ensure we don’t cross any invisible lines no one knows aside from you.
We should all do our best to be kind to one another but check your own self awarded privilege.
Most importantly. Outside of those things which are accepted in law as contributing to a breach of law anyone can say what they want. You don’t have a right to be offended. Subject to the above it doesn’t mean a thing if you are. That is your choice to make and process. It’s not anyone else’s job to adjust their personal autonomy so they don’t.
Whilst checking that privilege it may be worthwhile thinking how “fascistic regimes” may hold parallels with someone demanding others comply with his preferences, limit or alter their speech and/or submit to what they deem to be acceptable
So much fraud nowadays including by travel bloggers and readers. Understandable.
I retired about 6 years ago so no more business travel but have been gifting realities with hotel stays. My brother removed a couple years ago from WA to NM. They drove down, staying in about 5 different hotels on the way. My SIL identified the hotels and I called and made the res’s on my points. Note that my brother does not have the same last name, but we had no problems.
This year my sister went to PHX for spring training. We booked 4 different res with no problems and we did the same thing the year before.I might have come up against this so-called 5/year , I think 6 or 8 one year but no Marriott pushback. Maybe they just like me.