Tag Archives for starwood.
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.
The FAA took a new step to change the rules around supersonic travel. That should remove a huge hurdle to flying to London in 3 hours and to Tokyo in 5 hours.
f you’ve been a legacy Starwood guest, Marriott’s systems likely disclosed much of your personal information to hackers. Marriott announced that the Starwood reservation database was breached. They learned about the ongoing breach in September which they say had been occurring since 2014.
They are reporting access to about 500 million guest records, most including information like email addresses and passport numbers and some including credit card details as well.
Back in April I talked with Marriott’s Senior Vice President of Loyalty David Flueck and he assured me that the new Marriott program would continue to honor elite benefits when guests booked their stays through online travel agencies.
Marriott’s new terms and conditions were consistent with this, as well. It was a real improvement over how Starwood treated elites whose rooms were booked through these sites. And it lasted for all of two weeks.
IT is hard. No IT project ever has come in early or under budget. Things take longer than you think they will even accounting fro the fact that you know they’ll take longer than you think they will. However Marriott chose the date. August 18th. It was self-imposed.
It’s now been two and a half weeks. It’s past Labor Day. People are back at work, business travelers are about to start getting back on the road. The reasonable amount of patience that members have given has pretty well been exhausted.
At the beginning of the week I spoke with Marriott’s Senior Vice President for Loyalty David Flueck for an update on the integration of Starwood accounts onto the Marriott IT platform as they launched their new loyalty program on August 18th.
I reached out to Marriott for another update on where things stand fixing issues.
Priority Pass is a card that gets you into lounges around the world. You don’t have to belong to an individual lounge program, this program works to have lounges in most of the places you go.
There are over 1000 airport lounges that a Priority Pass will gain you access to, most of those are spread throughout airports around the world. Around 60 options exist in the U.S. and that increasingly includes airport restaurants.
When you have a Priority Pass card it may come with visits for you as the cardholder, and it may come with complimentary visits for guests.
On a scale of travel company IT integrations, Marriott’s new program launch didn’t go nearly as well as the largest travel program merger — American Airlines-US Airways — nor nearly as badly as the biggest debacle United-Continental.
While Marriott managed to get functionality up quickly to book reservations, even now 9 days later there are several lingering issues.
I spoke with David Flueck, Marriott’s Senior Vice President of Global Loyalty, to get a sense for where things stand — what bugs are still outstanding, and when we can expect those to be resolved.f
A roundup of the most important stories of the day. I keep you up to date on the most interesting writings I find on other sites – the latest news and tips.
When Marriott’s acquisition of Starwood first closed, they immediately allowed you to link accounts. That gave you the ability to status match and it gave you the ability to move points between accounts at a ratio of 1 Starpoint to 3 Marriott points. Linking accounts does not and will not ever automatically combine them.
Marriott tells me they are “now rolling out [the ability to combine accounts] in batches to our members through tomorrow. As a result, when members log in and see the prompt they will have the opportunity to combine their accounts.”
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 »
