Tag Archives for marriott.
Many Marriott Platinums see their suite night awards expire unused. Nonetheless, when they work they’re great.
Marriott has made two changes to Suite Night Awards, each reflecting problems with Marriott’s own internal systems that they’ve been unable to solve.
Marriott has a new global promotion (registration required by December 31) and it’s a secret promotion. What we know about it so far is incredibly weak. You don’t find out full details of the promotion until after your second stay.
I don’t know what the substance was in the bulk toiletry and it really doesn’t matter. That these get tampered with in practice should be enough to stop the project in its tracks. And 5000 Marriott points as an apology for this is genuinely offensive.
How can the hotel expect to charge for a room that is so poorly cared for by housekeeping, and that jeopardizes a guest’s health by allowing the toiletries to be compromised in this way?
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.
The lead plaintiff has stayed at over 45 Marriott properties and contends resort fees are ‘drip pricing’. He claims not to have realized resort fees applied for some of his stays when he made his booking, because those fees are obscured (under “taxes and fees”).
What we can hope to gain from this and the state investigations of resort fees is a change in industry practice where mandatory charges are included in the room rate so that consumers can compare pricing.
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.
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.”
he President’s personal assistant, Madeleine Westerhout, was fired on Thursday. On Friday the story came out that she had made comments at an off-the-record dinner with reporters August 17th hosted by deputy White House press secretary Hogan Gidley which got back to the White House.
Apparently Ms. Westerhout, after “a couple drinks and in an uncharacteristically unguarded moment,” made comments which – once reported back to the White House – made her continued employment untenable. That’s not the part of the story I’m interested in.
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.
Starwood Lurker no longer works for Starwood — or Marriott. The online face of hotel loyalty received the ultimate status match, a new job at Hilton.
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 »
