Marriott Has No Access To SPG Data?

A LoyaltyLobby reader approached us with an issue that many other Marriott Bonvoy members are facing. Their Platinum or higher status years are not correctly counted towards the lifetime status.

Readers are encouraged to send us questions, comments, or opinions by email, Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. We’ll try to cover them here several times a week.

You can access Marriott’s page for the Lifetime program here.

The reader sent us a long email thread with a representative from Marriott’s Office of Consumer Affairs that is mind-boggling. Marriott now claims that they no longer have access to pre-merger SPG information due to “complexities.”

Here’s the relevant reply from Marriott:

Thank you for your reply. I understand your frustration. Please rest assured that your account has gone through a thorough and extensive review by our technical team who have verified there are no missing qualifying years in your account.

Due to the complexities of the Starwood and Marriott merger in 2018, we can only provide Lifetime qualifying year data from December 2018 onwards.

We truly appreciate your loyalty and wish you safe travels.

Sincerely

REMOVED
Office of Consumer Affairs
Marriott International

Here’s the reader’s comment:

I am a Bonvoy Titanium member, with 11 SPG/Marriott Platinum+ years not counting 2021. Like many other readers, my account reflects fewer Platinum+ lifetime years (9) than I have earned.

I thought you might be interested in Marriott’s approach to resolving such discrepancies. Specifically, customer affairs expresses (below) that they are unable to access user data prior to the 2018 SPG merger; nevertheless, they express certainty in their count. In my case, I listed my status by year, have politely and repeatedly requested their by-year record of my status, and am met with crickets since their “can’t see before 2018” admission. Marriott’s response to a request for an audit / correction is therefore “trust us,” rather than “here are what our records show.”

If you believe this approach to customer service merits follow-up (if only to confirm that Lifetime Bonvoy customers are not entitled to confirmation of their records/status before 2018), please feel free to review the correspondence below. If not, then thank you for your time, and have a nice rest of your day!

Out articles surrounding this issue:

Conclusion

It would really surprise me if Marriott had deleted all the data that Starwood recorded of its guests even after “combining” the histories. Perhaps accessing the data requires an extra effort or is only possible by some Consumer Affairs team members?

I could understand that a reader could be wrong when counting these lifetime years. However, there are so many members that are adamant that theirs have not been counted correctly that I firmly believe that the ball is on Marriott’s court to resolve these issues.

My data is quite off too, but at least the lifetime years were enough to grant me lifetime Titanium at the time of the program merger.

If the reader lives in the EU/EEA area, they could always request Marriott to provide a data dump of all the information they have on record with the hotel company that can be hundreds of pages long. The request can be made by:

Contact our data protection officer responsible for your country or region via MarriottDPO@marriott.com. In your email, please indicate the country from which you are contacting us.

Marriott could always acquire the Starwood data from the hackers that stole it from the combined entity and posted it for sale on the dark web.