Marriott’s “Look No Further” Guarantee is now called “Best Rate Guarantee.” Since they promise you’ll get the best rate at Marriott.com, if you find a better rate elsewhere within 24 hours of booking they will give you your choice of:
- Matching the rate and an additional 25% discount (meant for people paying out of pocket)
- 5,000 points which I value at $35 (meant for people who don’t care how much their employer pays for the room)
Of course there are a bunch of asterisks and fine print around this, because it’s primarily meant as a marketing tool – to appear to put meat behind the claim that booking direct is cheaper and give confidence to customers to do so.
When you submit a claim the website tells you to direct any questions or correspondence to ‘LookNoFurther@Marriott.com’. It appears though that e-mail is being terminated.
In fact the back-end process where claims are verified appears to be managed by e-mail, with the Best Rate Guarantee form on the website generating an e-mail to that ‘LookNoFurther’ address for someone to pick up and process.
Since the form is still using this old e-mail address, though, and Marriott is killing the address, customers receive an auto-generated warning e-mail when they submit a claim.
We have received your message, and you will receive a reply from a team member soon; however, the message was received at an email account that will be discontinued soon. Please direct all future correspondence regarding Marriott’s Best Rate Guarantee to BestRateGuarantee@Marriott.com. Thank you!
The internal e-mail address that Marriott is using to process claims is changing. The old one is set to expire. However the website hasn’t been updated to use the new e-mail address, and this generates a message to the customer. Oops.
Here’s hoping Marriott IT can update the web form before IT expires the old address, or else Best Rate Guarantee claims will go into the ether the way so many customer service requests did last fall after Marriott, Starwood, and Ritz-Carlton loyalty accounts got combined with the launch of the new program.
(HT: Steve E.)
Are we sure this isn’t an intentional “oops!”?
I used to take advantage of Marriott BRG all the time, and was successful most of the time.
The validation process has changed for the worse, and I have not had a request approved in over a year.
Got a survey from Amex today about the new iteration of the SPG card – lambasted Marriott’s Idiotic IT the redemptions for the “free” night
And the general instability of the platform the reduction of points earning as opposed to say the Chase CSP … sad that I get better value from a non Marriott card than the Marrriott card
I don’t understand why they don’t just forward all of that email to the new address automatically. It takes 2 minutes to set up, and it goes to the new email address. My government email was able to do that for me (so we know it’s not that hard or expensive).
I don’t understand the incompetency of Marriott’s IT department.
Most of my BRG experiences seem to be, Marriott waits as LONG as possible to address my claim, and by the time they do, the rate has changed. Much better experience with Hotels.com that will check IMMEDIATELY when you have them on the phone and approve right on the spot when you are correct. I send screenshots with timestamps etc, but if they can’t replicate the rate, often DAYS later, they will not approve.