With probably 1000 nights in hotels in the last decade or so, I’ve spent a fair amount of time here discussing my hotel experiences and preferences. I’m a SPG Lifetime Platinum, and soon to be Marriott Lifetime Platinum. We are near the end of the Starwood loyalty program (sniff) Soon will be the full transition into Marriott and the still unnamed new loyalty program.
Due to my work travel patterns I’ve had a fair number stays at Marriott properties this year. Now that I know these stays will pool with my SPG stays for all of 2018, it is somewhat easier to take. One issue I’ve had is that every single stay this year has not posted to my Marriott Rewards account automatically. I’ve talked about it before, but hopefully there is now a solution. After each stay, I have to call/tweet to get my stays to post. Good times. I posted about this back in March, and things still aren’t better more than halfway through the year. I had thought that it was in issue with stays at international properties, but I had a stay at a domestic Marriott property that did not post on its own after more than a week. Frustrating.
Do your Marriott stays post without issue?
I can’t figure out what is causing this. I’m also not certain how to fix this particular issue. This time around, I spent far too long on hold hoping that a phone agent could help. It was almost 45 minutes before someone answered. But I was quickly on hold again. In all, my call took more than 90 minutes. Most of it on hold…
Previously I used twitter to resolve issues like this, typically Direct messages, and that took a day or so, but at least I wasn’t waiting on hold. I just kept my phone on speaker while I did other work. This time, my logic was to call and hopefully find someone who knew what do to, and fix it. I’m not sure that is what happened. After this long call, the agents I spoke to had no idea why this continued to happen. She mentioned resetting my account, and maybe this would help. I don’t have any other Marriott stays booked now, but we’ll see if anything changes next time around.
Long hold times, lack of responsiveness on Twitter. Sign of the future?
Thanks to elite status, I’m admittedly somewhat spoiled with regard to short hold times on the phone, so this 90+ minute call was pretty frustrating. Maybe I was rerouted to the general queue, but in any case, there is no excuse to make any customers wait that long. This is concerning going into the imminent consolidation of both loyalty programs. With Starwood, I would typically use online chat and more recently twitter DM to resolve small issues, and it would take just a few minutes. I don’t see any online chat option, and as I’ve mentioned twitter often takes at least a day to get a response. For many non-urgent requests, this is fine, but certainly not ideal. Concerning that there is no option to get a quick response if needed.
Like most mergers, the customers often suffer, I’m sure that will be the case here. Things won’t be as good as they were. I don’t exactly have a great feeling about this given my recent experience with poor IT, and worse customer service. Hopefully the IT issue is just an oddity, but I’ve read other reports of long phone holds. Hopefully this is just temporary during the transition time.
More issues to come during IT transition
Marriott recently sent out an email warning of planned disruptions during IT transition period. Maybe this explains some of the long delay, but get ready for more issues. Hopefully after this is finished, hold times will be improved. But I’m not particularly optimistic.
Have you experienced any IT issues or long delays when trying to get assistance?
