During the NFL season, Marriott often held a Twitter promotion called “Extra Points Sundays”, as detailed in this post from The Points Guy prior to the Super Bowl. They held this promotion almost every week during the 17-week regular season for 1,000 points each, and 3 times during the Super Bowl for 500 points each. Simply link your Marriott Rewards number to your Twitter account, and if you answered every question correctly, you’d get more than 14,000 free Marriott points, worth close to $140.
Being an ardent sports fan and traveler, I followed this closely and answered all of the questions correctly. However, when checking my Marriott account in late January, no points had posted from the promotion. I reached out to Marriott on Twitter, who replied quickly. Initially they told me to ensure my account was connected. It was, as when I tried again, I got a message noting as much. I also knew this was the case, as I had remembered previously connecting my Marriott Rewards number across all social media during a promotion giving 500 points for each media to which you connect your account.
I replied to Marriott again and, and they then sent me a link to disconnect and re-connect my Marriott Rewards number to ensure that everything would work properly. I did this, got another confirmation, and wrote back to Marriott asking when I can expect the points to be credited. Marriott’s response was as terse as it can be:
We do not retroactively add points and we do apologize for this, but please stay tuned for our next Marriott Rewards promotional offer.
Wow. As if their yearly destruction of our point values isn’t enough, their customer service also fails miserably. Many messages over a few weeks, and I never got a single acknowledgement of this being an issue in their system, and only a cursory boilerplate “apology.” This is yet another reason why the singular value in Marriott points is in transferring them to Starwood Preferred Guest. If we thought their constant devaluations were bad, they pale in comparison to their putrid customer service and complete lack of bedside manner.
Speaking of, if you’d like join me in avoiding Marriott like the plague, this is a great time to get started on SPG points! There’s currently a targeted increased offer of 30,000 Starpoints on the SPG credit card from American Express upon spending $3,000 in your first three months as a card member. (I got this while logged in, but not when using an incognito window, so remember that Your Mileage May Vary.) If you can get this, it is a 20% increase over the standard 25,000 point offer, and a great way to get going with the single most valuable and flexible point currency!
Michael Prodanovich is a contributor to Point Me to the Plane, and author of The Ultimate Guide to Free Travel
The responses below are not provided or commissioned by the bank advertiser. Responses have not been reviewed, approved or otherwise endorsed by the bank advertiser. It is not the bank advertiser's responsibility to ensure all posts and/or questions are answered.
8 comments
Something must be wrong on your part. Everyone one of mine got posted to my account without issue or me contacting Marriott. I have been a Marriott member since 1987 and have never had an issue with them. I am lifetime Platinum so I have plenty of interactions with Marriott. When I have had a less than stellar situation, they made it right.
Good luck in sorting out your problems.
Same thing happened to me as well. No points. I thought they would be distributed at the end of the promotion. Marriott is a complete waste of time. So much for my loyalty with Marriott as a platinum.
During the promotion after every time you answered a question correctly, Michael, you should have received a “tweet” from Marriott Rewards stating “You got it! Your points will post in 24 hours. Come back next week for another chance to score.”
If you have any of these “tweets”, you should be able to prove to Marriott Rewards that you did participate in the promotion.
If you were following the promotion closely, you also would have seen that Marriott Rewards was sending similar “tweets” to other participants who answered correctly, which should have given you an idea early on that something was not right if you were not receiving those “tweets”.
I am by no means whatsoever a Marriott Rewards apologist; but I can somewhat understand them not wanting to award points retroactively if you cannot prove that you were eligible to participate in this promotion, as that would give everyone an easy opportunity to claim points retroactively without participating in the promotion.
Yeah, I did indeed get those Tweet-backs from Marriott, so I can use that in my further communications. Good idea!
Good luck, Michael.
I will be looking forward to an update…
An allegedly savvy points blogger doesn’t check if a weekly bonus posted until the END of the promotion?! Consider the missing points a stupid tax.
Also, the promotion did not run every week during the regular season. One or two weeks were skipped.
Try again. They didn’t post some of the points to my account and when I received a similar reply I basically told the agent I was only doing as I was directed to do so by customer service.I’m stubborn and persistent I just tweeted them directly a few more times and they posted my points. Don’t take no for an answer would be my advice.
Great post. The entire Marriott-NFL tweet nonsense that was heavily promoted by many bloggers was a bust. I won’t waste my time with their games.