Rather frustrated with Marriott Rewards right now.
Back in mid-February, I emailed the statuschallenge email and requested a Marriott Gold statuschallenge. I am already Marriott Silver.
I'm a new consultant, travelling Mon-Thurs every week. That's a lot of future stays. At that point, Marriott emailed me with the terms of the Gold challenge (6 stays before end of May 2015) to be qualified as Gold. Great, no problem, I was excited to have Gold status by the end of March (6 weeks = 6 stays).
I'm in the middle of my 5th stay, but when I checked in this week, I saw that I was already listed as Gold. This caused me to double check the challenge email from mid-Feb, when I noticed that I had to respond to the email to accept the challenge offer. As busy as I am, I missed that little detail, so my last 5 stays apparently do not count.
I emailed back and forth a few times with Marriott Rewards customer service today, as well as called their telephone customer service, and they won't budge -- they can't backdate the Gold statuschallenge start date to the original email date. I strongly suggested that I was likely to cancel my remaining reservations with Marriott (12 stays over the next 12 weeks at the same Marriott property, over the duration of my current client project) over my frustration, and they didn't seem to care.
I'm now enrolled in the Taste of Gold challenge, so it would require me to stay another 6 times to qualify. I was hoping to use stays in April and May to count towards Platinum status, instead of still working on qualifying for Marriott Gold. Additionally, the 2 stays I have scheduled over the next 2 weeks (before the start of the Taste of Gold challenge period on Apr 1) - don't count towards the challenge. So I'm inclined just to cancel those and stay somewhere else.
What are my options? Am I just out of luck, and have to restart my 6 stays? My objective is to have the 5 stays I've already completed count towards the 6 I need for Gold status. At this point I have 31 nights this year (including those with my Marriott Rewards Visa) so 6 more stays @ 3 nights each will get me to Gold just through the normal 50 nights.
I'm totally inclined to switch to the Sheraton up the road and start on their Platinum challenge instead for my next 12 stays. This just seems to be leaving a bad taste in my mouth and I can't believe Marriott would be willing to lose what will be a VERY frequent stay customer over a process that requires the customer to reply to confirm an offer that starts with "please allow me to extend the offer of a Gold Elite Status challenge."
Please, Marriott - make this right.