Tag Archives for bonvoy.
There are numerous built-in reasons why a hotel wants to engage in deceptive practices like resort fees. Marriott creates another such incentive for its hotels. Hotels get to charge these fees to award guests (Hilton and Hyatt do not allow this) and hotels don’t have to pay for points for the resort fee portion of a room rate.
Rebranding a loyalty program just doesn’t make sense when you start with both a recognizable name and a good reputation. You wind up spending nine figures on advertising, merchandising, printing, and education — all to get back to where you started, at best, which is that the median consumer doesn’t even identify which brands are part of the program.
Marriott Chief Marketing Officer Karin Timpone will step down at the end of the year to “pursue new opportunities.”
She said “Having completed the Marriott Bonvoy launch with key marketing benchmarks ahead of estimates, this a perfect time for me to thoughtfully plan my next move.”
Starwood Preferred Guest had a policy they called ‘true redemption’. It wasn’t just no blackouts, where a hotel put certain dates off limit for using points. It was no capacity controls. That meant if any standard room was available for sale you could use points to book that room.
Now with Marriott Bonvoy it seems some hotels are able to play games they weren’t able to before.
Twitter used to be the “go-to” way of getting personalized customer service, and with some brands it still is. Many companies assign super competent agents to deal with twitter, and empower them to cut through bureaucracy to solve problems.
Not all do however. And some just follow the ‘first rule of social media’ which is to try to get customers to stop blasting the company as quickly as possible. The easiest way to do that is to get the customer to ‘take it to DM’.
A roundup of the most important stories of the day. I keep you up to date on the most interesting writings I find on other sites – the latest news and tips.
Marriott hasn’t talked about the really valuable data that’s been breached, preferring to focus on expired credit cards and passports. The EU proposes to fine Marriott for a criminal hack of their systems, which is how the law works, but it’s not clearly the best way to drive collaboration between large companies and government agencies protecting against nation state attacks.
And indeed it’s government agencies that are the biggest violators of data privacy.
Yesterday I wrote about Lufthansa’s “Mileage Bargains” — roundtrip business class awards between the US and Europe for just 55,000 miles.
Commenter Tim noted that “Lufthansa says that as of May 24th 2019 they no longer are accepting Marriott points for transfers to Lufthansa miles.” It turns out the problem is not limited to Marriott transfers.
Mark Brugger, the President and Chief Executive Officer of Diamondrock Hospitality, spoke about how Marriott’s new loyalty program is affecting his hotels during the company’s earnings call.
When asked by analysts to provide color on the Bonvoy transition, he noted lower costs and some positives and negatives depending on the property but where he zeroed in on a problem it’s providing breakfast at resorts to elites.
When things go wrong, either because a hotel doesn’t deliver promised benefits or because something doesn’t work right on the back end with an account, it’s almost impossible to get swift any resolution from Marriott Bonvoy. Customer service is a problem.
When things go smoothly – as they do the majority of the time – Marriott has, in my opinion, a better program than Hilton or IHG. But when they fail the issues are magnified because these failures are primarily happening to their highest volume most loyal members and because there’s no mechanism to fix the issue. That’s a problem, but it’s one that can be fixed.
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 »
