Tag Archives for marriott.
The hotel business can be strange in many ways. But timeshare brands are far, far stranger.
How about Marriott Vacations controlling Hyatt’s timeshare portfolio? That’s something not a lot of people realize but gets a big exclamation point from Marriott Vacations Worldwide spending $430 million to acquire Welk Resorts to turn them into Hyatt Residenes properties. And wait – there are Lawrence Welk hotels?
When Marriott acquired Starwood and merged the loyalty programs, as much changed with their credit cards as with the loyalty program itself.
Chase’s Marriott cards used to earn 1 point per dollar. Starwood’s Amex cards earned 1 Starwood point per dollar. Marriott themselves declared 1 SPG point worth 3 Marriott points. In other words, the Amex cards were 3 times as rewarding for spending.
Before the pandemic there was no greater loyalty program with a gap between what it promised and what it delivered than Marriott Bonvoy. On paper it took the best features of Starwood Preferred Guest with the scale of properties of Marriott and merged them together. And yet the program has simply failed to deliver elite benefits consistently at the property level.
The irony of course is that before acquiring Starwood, Marriott Rewards wasn’t very generous with elites but they were consistent. The Marriott brand across the board was consistency. Now they’re the Forrest Gump of loyalty: you never know what you’re going to get until check-in. This have only gotten worse.
Just because a room is available for sale doesn’t mean a member requesting a Suite Night Award will be upgraded to it if Marriott forecasts that the room will be sold.
A room can be available 24 hours prior to check-in, but Marriott’s systems will still hold back the inventory to possibly sell to someone rather than upgrade the member into that room.
Marriott has a status challenge program where they’ll give anyone with at least mid-tier status in one of the major hotel loyalty programs and just one night of stay credit in the past year up to Platinum status in their program for 90 days, and a quick path to keep that status.
Outside of Chase transfers to Hyatt, conversions of transferrable points into hotel points is simply a bad deal and a 30% transfer bonus doesn’t reverse that calculus. American Express points are just too valuable to transfer to Marriott given the weak transfer ratio.
I’ve heard from a number of Marriott Bonvoy Platinum and Ambassador members who have shared that they aren’t getting upgraded like they’re used to. That seems surprising at first. With the hotel industry in an unprecedented crisis of low occupancy, an upgrade should be easier than ever to come by!
I asked Marriott about this, and a spokesperson confirmed that members aren’t being upgraded more frequently this year – but they’re also not having their requests denied more often either. Here’s what’s happening.
Between May 18 and July 15, Marriott ran their biggest-ever points purchase bonus offering 60% more points for the same money. Now they have brought this bonus back. It can be worthwhile for certain hotel redemptions – and also for laundering points into some obscure-yet-valuable airline frequent flyer progams.
Marriott CEO Arne Sorenson endorsed ‘hygiene theater’ explicitly speaking at Skift‘s Global Forum. He knows that some Covid efforts aren’t effective but sees them as important signaling tools anyway.
Sorenson has previously been an enthusiastic supporter of a strong central Chinese government and its response to Covid-19. At Skift he again talks about their success in handling the virus and simply says that the country’s authoritarianism “is what it is.”
A significant number of Marriott Ambassador agents have been notified that their positions are being eliminated, generally effective October 1. This isn’t the first round of layoffs for Ambassador agents. The hotel chain shed customer service agents who work with top guests back in March, effectively eliminating the ‘dedicated agent assignment’ for customers who stay 100 nights and spend $20,000 each year with Marriott.
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 »
