Sorry to bring this topic up yet again but it does seem to me that we non-USA residents are treated as 2nd class members by Marriott? Looking through the discussions on MI, there seem to be a number of areas where we miss out ... E.g.
1. We don't have a Visa card and the one that we did have, was pretty poor compared with that offered to USA members.
2. We can't buy gift cards in anything but USD.
3. We don't even get birthday cards.
4. There may be others ... But it is difficult to know what you don' t know!
... or am I just being a sensitive Brit?
I know that there are some fixes for these in the pipeline but we do seem to be lagging behind the Marriott "homeland".