This Marriott Hotel Is Fed Up With Elites — The Sign Says You Are Not Even Entitled To Water

Being a Marriott Bonvoy member is like navigating Kafka’s bureaucracy blindfolded. So this Marriott hotel wants to make absolutely clear that Ambassador members and other elites are not entitled to a complimentary bottle of water.

Aside from being cheap and insulting, the hotel’s real beef is with… Marriott… whose benefit charts are nearly impossible for the median IQ member to to understand what applies where, with which brands, and when. Most just know they ‘usually get’ free bottled water, assume it’s a benefit when they book with Marriott because of their status. And so the hotel, which doesn’t want to be more generous than it has to be, has gotten frustrated telling members they’re wrong. They made a sign.

Show us on the doll where the water bottle touched you…
byu/New-Dependent-4331 inmarriott

This sign is factually correct. Marriott requires Fairfield Inn properties to offer Platinum, Titanium, and Ambassador Bovnoy members an Elite Welcome Gift choice at check-in:

• 500 points per stay, or
• an F&B item (in the U.S., Canada and Europe – in Asia, Australia, Pacific Islands, Caribbean, Mexico, Central America, South America, the Middle East, and Africa it’s an F&B “amenity”)

Many hotels offer bottled water. Some brands do offer complimentary water independet of elite benefits. Others are either being generous or treating the water as the food and beverage ‘item’. The program terms do not require Fairfield properties to provide complimentary bottled water specifically to elites.

Of course, Marriott’s elite breakfast policy is even more opaque and confusing than its welcome amenity. There’s a special sort of hermeneutical exegesis required to unearth the true meaning of their elite breakfast benefits – as every brand, region and resort status rewrites the rulebook. Figuring out the correct breakfast benefit for a given hotel is harder than unraveling Schrödinger’s cat’s tax return.

What’s really going on is that,

• Marriott’s primary interes is making owners happy. Their CEO has said they’ll put “net rooms growth” on his tombstone. So owners can do as they wish, and policies are meant to attract owners.

• The Bonvoy program is how they market hotels. It’s how they deliver customers to owners. They need to convince members it’s valuable, or else they have little to sell to the owners.

• So each owner is supposed to honor the program. But they want to spend as little as possible doing so.

It’s a tragedy of the commons. The value of Bonvoy is that members believe perks will show up reliably, so they’ll choose Marriott more often and pay more to do it. That belief is what lets Marriott sell “demand” to owners, keep fees flowing, and grow franchise contracts.

Each owner, though, wants to take the demand the program delivers, while minimizing the cost of delivering the perks. Upgrades, breakfast, late checkout, lounge access, bottled water, bonus points, —those hit the property expense lines directly, while the downside of disappointing one elite guest is often delayed, diffuse, or pushed onto “Bonvoy” as a brand rather than that owner.

Bonvoy’s credibility is the shared pasture. Each owner can “graze” it by skimping a little, saving money while still benefiting from the program’s overall pull.

If too many owners do that, the shared resource (member trust that benefits will be honored) gets worn down, and the program stops being as powerful at generating incremental stays and premium pricing, hurting all owners (who can always defect to another brand) and Marriott.

Incidentally, bottled water is an explicit elite benefit starting at the Discoverist level in the World of Hyatt program.