Wyndham Rewards just posted this to Facebook:
Wyndham offered status matches and to match Starwood account balances with quadruple the points if you donated your full account balance to charity.
About 40 minutes prior to the start of the promotion they announced they wouldn’t be honoring the offer after all.
I desperately hoped no one donated their Starwood account balances prior to the offer’s official start time in detrimental reliance on receiving 4 times the Wyndham Rewards points.
Poor showing Wyndham. It’s not the first time they’ve refused to honor a published promotion, either.
I second the “I hope no one” sentiment. I cannot even imagine the fury and backfire of people who have lost out on (the most) precious points for virtually nothing, other than the value of giving…
This is sad. It seems that this just reinforces our suspicion about Wyndham’s intent with their recent sneaky CC incentive devaluation. For those who care deeply about such programs (View from the Wing readers and the like) and have the most to give to Wyndham, this is a HUGE warning sign to stay far away from any promotion, marketing or “promise” they might make.
I’d like them to post those obvious examples of fraud. More likely they realized just how much they’d have to pay out if everyone dumps their Marriott points and possibly supplement with UR transfers.
Any promotion that relies on unverifiable screen shots is doomed to be taken advantage of.
As I recently said, Wyndham is not a company you want to do business with.
I just donated approx. 80,000 SPG points in order to load up for a vacation at the Wyndham Kona. Can I get the SPG points back??
2 Nights At Tigerland Safari Resort In Nepal, South Asia
Easy come easy go!
I’ll make it a point not to stay at any of their properties. I hope others do the same.
Don’t blame Wyndham – blame the fraudsters that continue to cause problems for the points/miles/MS hobby instead of just playing along like the rest of us who still end up way ahead with the long game.
How could Wyndham detect obvious and massive fraud even before the promotion started?
@ Norita, I agree, highly suspicious. They probably realized how many points they’d give away so they made up a reason to cancel it.
I mean, literally the second comment on Lucky’s post on this was somebody telling people how to commit fraud on this deal.
I’m sure Wyndham probably would have been on the hook for more than they expected from this promotion, but I totally buy that people were sending them doctored screenshots to try to get the points without donating to charity (which they should have known going in).
Somehow JetBlue made a similar promotion work without massive fraud. Probably adding a flight requirement and capping the number of points limited their exposure. Nicely done Wyndham!
It sucks, but I’d have to side with Wyndham. I guarantee there’s people out there that sent in doctored screenshots of a half million SPG points. These are the same people that don’t know how to stay in the playing field. The only feedback I’d have for Wyndham is that they should have set better parameters to limit even those fraudsters. Fortunately, as someone said, JetBlue did that.
“When pigs become hogs, they get slaughtered.”
I think people are being too hard on wyndham here. There was obvious fraud and it was in a lot of places. Reddit especially they were openly talking about exactly how they planned to fraud this promo. It use to be that the e-penis bragging was done after the fact, now its come down to people bragging even before they horsefek the rewards program. Fact is that if so many examples are out there of people openly talking about frauding, how many were actually getting ready to do just that and were being silent about it?
It is the chinese player again. Photoshop?
@Adam Smith: Explain to us why they were Chinese?
Couldn’t a company like Wyndham even remotely think of the number of frauds that could play out with this promotion?
I wasn’t going to take part, but could see the potential frauds from 10 miles away. If they didn’t want to deal with frauds, they should’ve put more rules/restrictions. Unless they were just looking for publicity.
Anyway you look at it, this didn’t cast a positive light on Wyndham at all.
I think it was because of Trump and the Russians
@Neil
Actually it was John Podesta realizing that Hillary is starting to hate everyday Americans (re: WikiLeaks dump).
The problem is they have no way of verifying anything, even if the donations are legit. It was going to be way more than 5 million points (they said they will donate), maybe 25-50 million. They should have been prepared for that or just say first come first serve with a cap.
I hope that Wyndham will actually stand by the terms of the offer for anyone who genuinely donated his [or her] SPG miles to charity and can actually prove it by confirmation from the charity not just a screenshot.