Room Location Request at Marriott Grande Vista?

[kath1210]

Does anyone know the best way to get a room request satisfied at Marriott Grande Vista? My family is going down in a couple of weeks to celebrate my father's 75th birthday. We have rented (my brother and I rented separately) a 2BR Villa and a 1BR Villa, and would like to at least be in the same building.

When I contacted Marriott by e-mail, they said "to protect the security of our guests" they cannot honor such requests. They did say we could make the request at check-in, but we are not checking in on the same day. From what I can tell, this place is huge and it will ruin our trip if we cannot be relatively close to each other. We want to be able to cook and eat together, play cards and games, etc. We are going to be really unhappy if we are at opposite ends of the resort.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

 

[Detailor]

The resort makes initial villa assignments about two or three weeks before check-in. Those assignments are subject to change as the resort staff makes every effort to place people in available units as they show up to check in or there may be issues with a particular villa that require shifting things around.

I'd suggest a couple of things...

Call the resort directly and ask for the person who handles villa assignments. Explain your particular situation and ask them to note your request(s) on your reservation. Grande Vista's local telephone number is 407-238-7676.

Join Marriott Rewards and make a request through the marriott.com reservation system. While I've done this before for that specific resort, I don't recall exact how I did it so I guess you'd have to hunt for the right place in their online system. Since your reservation has already been made you'd have to request that you're Marriott Rewards number be attached to the reservation and then go from there. This method, once you've gotten things figured out, should work regardless of how you made your reservation.

The one piece of advice that I'd add is that neither of those actions will guarantee that your request will be satisfied. So you'll likely have to ask when you check in (or whomever checks in first will have to ask). Being as flexible as possible is important so don't demand that you get access to your villa as soon as possible or that only certain buildings will work for you, if they can satisfy your request they probably have to move other people's reservations around.

Good luck.

Dick Taylor

 

[kath1210]

Thanks very much, Dick! I do belong to Marriott Rewards, and marriott.com is how I made the initial request. I will try to call the resort tomorrow and will have my brother call too. He is also a Marriott Rewards member.

I do realize that there is no guarantee. I will be happy if we are all in the same building. I don't mind where we are otherwise. At the very least, I would like to be in the same main pool area.

Keeping my fingers crossed!