This Wednesday it is worth to whine about a real nuisance than can cost you a lot of personal time, auditing your hotel bonus accounts after your stays: Missing stay credits and incorrect postings.
The more stays you have the more difficult it is to keep an eye on your postings especially when multiple programs and brands are involved as some are more reliable than others.
Every week we receive emails and messages from our readers complaining about these problems and some of these programs really stand out for being notorious in posting incorrect credits or none at all.
I’ve been traveling as well for 3 weeks straight and also collected at least 3 cases where credits have been either incorrect or missing completely.
The first issue was at the Grand Hyatt Taipei where I had to extend my stay for another day, yet only the first night posted to my account. The bill already looked weird as Hyatt shows exactly how many qualifying nights and eligible spend you have and I was assured this would be corrected manually as I had two reservation numbers. Lip service as it turned out as of course this never happened.
The Hotel Manager replied:
When the stay of 2 nights consists of 2 back-to-back reservations, the system would automatically recognize the points credit and night(s) credit on the second reservation, which is the one with account settlement upon check-out. As for the night credit on the first reservation, our Front Office would need to process the credit manually by sending request form to Gold Passport Centre. Hence the credits did not go into your account at the same time. The manual credit would take longer.It is confirmed that we have sent out the manual credit request already. We will re-send it again and follow up accordingly to ensure it is done.
Seriously? Is it THAT difficult? Then why not just close the reservation and do a completely new check-in as I offered it?
Hyatt also has frequent problems of posting the 1000 Diamond Amenity points (1W coded). Whevever you have to call in for that Hyatt will add an extra 500 points for the inconvenience.
The next problem was a stay that was supposed to land in my SPG account while staying at a Total Rewards partner hotel (Ceasars Palace) in Las Vegas. Until today the stay has not showed up in my account and SPG Customer Service is useless as they refer to Total Rewards being responsible. Terrible!
SPG has a very bad system in posting missing stays. Usually they want to have the folio and at the same time often audit your SPG account for any stays that have potentially posted outside program rules to your advantage.
Another Las Vegas stay that is missing stems from my one night at The Mirage. MLife is a Hyatt Gold Passport partner and should post automatically provided the number is entered properly. This proves difficult because the Mirage honestly has some of the most incompetent front desk employees of the MGM Group.
I contacted MGM regarding this stay credit and a attached a copy of my Folio.
Dear all,
I would like to remind you to please post this stay at the Mirage to my Hyatt Diamond account xxxxxxxx.
Not sure why I always have to request this manually, one should think that several years after starting this marketing relationship you should have figured out how to post it properly.
MGM responded with a form email that it would take 30 days to process the request.
Let’s see if anything posts this time around. Last year, after three attempts made, I had to threaten a BBB and Attorney General Consumer Complaint until someone finally took action and posted the stay.
I found it very easy to get missing stays with Hilton corrected and Marriott tends to be alright as well via email. A big problem with Marriott Rewards is that the properties do not have an automated link with the Opera system the hotels use so all stays have to be posted manually.
IHG is another example of totally inept customer service (based in the Philippines) if you’re ever in the need to contact them for a correction which happens more often than not. Only 3 out of 8 IHG stays I had since December posted correctly.
Conclusion
If you have many stays during a certain period of time you should either keep your receipts, images of them or at least make notes when you stayed where so to not lose oversight and potentially can call up your hotel program to have it corrected. Having to deal with these things is a nuisance and complete waste of time which goes back to the ancient IT systems these hotels use. Especially in the case of Hyatt which must be the worst IT of the entire industry.
