We were bonvoyed. We made a reservation back in August using our 35k certificate at Sea World Renaissance for this March. We got an email confirmation showing the certificate was attached to the reservation. I recently checked the reservation and the certificate is gone and they want to charge us 40k points even though we made no changes to the reservation. When we called they claimed the best they could do was give us the 5,000 point difference and the certificate back. They say there’s no way to use the certificate on this reservation anymore. The 40,000 points are more valuable to me than getting back a certificate that I’m finding difficult and frustrating to use. They claim they’re opening a case but I’m not holding my breath. It was one of the worst customer service experiences I’ve ever had. The supervisor wouldn’t even listen while I was speaking. Anybody have experience with getting something like this resolved?
This kind of reminds me of what happened to a lot of points reservations last month. There seems to have been a glitch that canceled old points bookings that should have locked in the old, lower rate, and rebooked the reservation with a new, higher rate, without the reservation holder having made any changes.
Here’s a post about this issue:
https://www.doctorofcredit.com/marr...ting-points-automatically-check-your-account/ (This DoC story is for your resource and background info only. Please don’t be one of those people on a call with Marriott who says something like, “but there’s a post on the Doctor of Credit blog that says so and so!”)
I’ve only seen DPs of this issue affecting purely points reservations, not FNCs. The solution has typically been for Marriott to issue a courtesy adjustment of points for the difference between the old rate and the new rate to cover your reservation. This appears to be what Marriott has done in your case. However, as you know, there’s no way to combine your 35k FNC with the 5k points adjustment to get your room back.
What needs to happen is you need to demand your room back, escalate if you have to, HUCA if you have to, and ask that Marriott take your FNC that had been attached to your reservation and give you another adjustment for the value of the FNC (35k) so that you have 40k points to use on the room that you had already booked before their error. I don’t know if the supervisor you talked to will do it, but keep calling and try to speak to someone else. Marriott doesn’t have a policy of letting you “cash out” FNCs for their points value (wouldn’t we all love to jump on this if they did?), but this is Marriott’s error so they should be able to make an exception to help you fix their mistake. This solution should technically be possible.
I hope this works out.
You know, in the spirt of AA.
