Tag Archives for best rate guarantee.
Last fall I found several Marriott hotels sell their rooms for less on Airbnb than at Marriott.com. Marriott isn’t ok with this and cracked down on the specific properties I noted, but the practice continues and one guest even managed a successful best rate guarantee against an Airbnb listing.
The truth is that hotels do regularly sell rooms cheaper through third parties than they do on their own website, they just work really hard to disguise it and to gate off consumers from accessing those cheaper rates – because they want to fill incremental rooms that would go unsold, but without undercutting the prices they can book the rest of their rooms at.
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.
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 »
