News and notes from around the interweb:
- One of the women off of a Qatar Airways flight last year given an invasive gynecological inspection tells her story.
- Southwest Airlines gate agent Scott in Phoenix is the best
@SouthwestAir This is how you welcome passengers. pic.twitter.com/1ZaP3vgE7Q
— Susan Karnes (@suztexfrance) December 4, 2021
- Isn’t this just great? (HT: Ben)
- In a move that does nothing to solve the chain’s four big problems, Marriott Bonvoy creates its own NFTs.
Meanwhile Marriott’s CEO says workers make too much money because of high pay rates at Amazon and you have to go without daily housekeeping but yeah hire people to make NFTs.
And by the way here’s the Dogecoin Rap.
- Since Omicron was spreading inside the U.S. even before the variant was identified by researchers in South Africa, the U.S. is reconsidering the ban on travel by non-residents from several southern African nations.
Re Marriott: it really is up to customers to respond. As long as people keep reacting to this with a “sure whatever”, nothing else really matters.
Unless maybe there is a massive bedbug infestation at one of these hotels that shuts them down for 3 days?
I truly feared this day would come now that the Marriotts are gone from control and day to day operations. Marriott has lost its way from what Willard founded the company on and Bill made Marriott a household name. Now this crap. I grew up in the DC area my family did business with Willard and Bill I have 4300+ room nights at a Marriott so I do have “skin in the game”
“Chatter” is correct customers need to respond letting this clown know who really matters and it not him not his vaulted ownership groups it US we pay the bills.
Marriott is not a hotelier. It is a marketing company with a hotel booking platform. Less than 30% of Marriott’s hotels are managed by Marriott. There is no way a company that doesn’t operate over 70% of its hotels can control quality. Remember, Marriott’s real customer are the owners and hotel management companies that choose to use Marriott for selling rooms. The guests that stay in hotels are merely the product Marriott sells its real customer.
This isn’t exclusively a Marriott issue
Hilton has the same thing going on but Marriott seems to be the brand people love to hate
“Mets Fan in NC” seems to be correct. Its sad I am sitting on just south of 2mm points with the way this clown is going now those will pay for 2 nights at a Fairfield Inn in Thermal Ca
The travel ban is, sadly, one of the only tools in the toolbox to address this. It’s used specifically because it’s politically palatable (as opposed to, say, mandating vaccines).
Travel bans are also very clearly a terrible, very nearly worthless tool for a constantly mutating infectious disease. We don’t have tools available to detect variants when they develop, so by the time one is spotted, it’s almost certainly going to have a toehold in every major nation (China, Brazil, India, Russia, much of Europe, etc.). So, you’re not going to stop spread. What you *might* do is slow it down. However, COVID-19 is so incredibly transmissible that the slowdown will have a comparatively tiny effect if there are more than even a few cases. I expect any scientific basis for the travel ban will be exhausted by the end of this month.
In the meantime, real people are suffering because they cannot travel.
Sadly, I believe we are living in one of the darker timelines.
@Ghostrider5408, I’m sitting on 4.4 million points in Bonvoy.
I have to agree with the folks commenting about Marriott. I left Marriott quite some time ago . My profile is a bit different than most travelers . I am a less frequent but high spend guest . I pay for the room type I want and usually have high food and beverage spend on property .
When Marriott announced Bonvoy , I expressed my concerns that there was no path to higher status via spend – a feature of all competitor programs . I found it puzzling that someone with my profile ($20,000 spend on 25-30 nights ) could only hope for Gold status . Marriott basically told me tough luck .
I reached out to 2 competitors that I thought would appreciate my profile. I received very quick replies from loyalty executives who immediately offered top tier status . I chose one and haven’t looked back .
I know some of you will fairly comment “why do you care about status if you buy suites and pay for food and beverage ?” At the time , the Ambassador program looked inviting . A personal point of contact for special requests , My24 (I think that’s what it’s called ) , late checkout (remember I was only a Gold under the new program ) , and the promise of better and more responsive customer service . Well , we know how the Ambassador program has actually materialized .
I was recently at a Ritz that I frequented when I was a Marriott loyalist . I was there to meet a friend and was waiting at the bar and chatting with a bar tender I have known for years . He asked me why they haven’t seen me in ages – even pre pandemic . I told him my story . Unbeknownst to me he asked a hotel manager to come and chat with me . He came prepared with my stay history etc . We had a very cordial conversation. He could only shake his head . He gave me his card and told me he would be more than happy to be my personal point of contact if I wished to return to that property . I thanked him but told him that I had pledged my loyalty elsewhere and did not wish to not live up to the commitment I made to the competitor – just as I had stayed loyal to Marriott for many years . He understood .
Including my company spend (I control the travel), I have spent $150,000 with Marriott since January 1, 2020, and over $600,000 since 2016. Needles to say, I’m a multi-year ambassador. I complained to Marriott and escalated to corporate executives. Long story short, I asked for them to apply some of my 2021 and 2020 spend toward qualification in 2022 for 2023 status. The junior executives responding for their bosses basically told me to pound sand and offered nothing to retain my business. If Marriott doesn’t care about my $600,000 spend then they certainly aren’t going to care about a platinum or titanium.
Southwest’s way of welcoming passengers — singing (and spewing aerosol) while maskless!! At least this guy is not 6 inches away from the passengers like the singing FA.
Ya gotta love how Southwest is so proud of not following federal guidelines.
Wow. I worked for Marriott for many years. Met J Willard and son. How Third World do we want to go?
“I had pledged my loyalty elsewhere and did not wish to not live up to the commitment I made to the competitor – just as I had stayed loyal to Marriott for many years”
Yall are strange. These are faceless corporations. They don’t give a shit about who you “pledge loyalty” to. Brand loyalty is for chumps. Who has a hotel where you need to be? That’s the only loyalty that matters. The Marriotts, Hiltons, Trumps, and whatever other rich asshole families own or owned hotels in the past don’t know who you are and don’t care where you bend the knee
Schiphol airport has the same polite baggage system, as does LHR T2 iirc.
Marriott only cares about money
@TimD: They only care about money from their real customers, the owners. Marriott thinks there are enough people out there that losing disgruntled elites won’t impact their bottom line because Marriott neither owns hotel nor manages most of its hotels. Marriott is just a booking platform. They collect 4-8% of revenue from hotels that franchise or license the name. Marriott’s real customers are the owners, not the guests. The guests are the product that they sell the owners to fly the Marriott flag and not Hilton or IHG. The reality is Hyatt is not Marriott’s competition. Marriott is more concerned about losing owners to IHG, Wyndham and, to a lesser extent, Hilton than Hyatt.
It’s too bad Starwood didn’t buy Marriott. Had that happened – we’d all be a LOT happier staying at Starwood properties. THEY knew the value of their guests and it showed through and through. I refuse to stay at any Marriott or Hilton property now and prefer to stay at boutique-style hotels where they actually remember who you are – not just member number XA5G6732M92840!
I guess it says a lot about the readership of this site that there so many petty comments about a shitty hotel chain being shitty, and none about Qatar Airways sexually assaulting a passenger.
The singing guy is the worst.
BL nailed it. Completely unacceptable that this happened to the passengers.
Marriott does not own any hotels. The family trust owns 7 including the Longbeach Courtyard.