I wrote a blog recently titled When Travel Goes From Bad to Worse. The really bad part of the trip was when the Spring Hill Suites, a Marriott property at the Atlanta airport, didn’t honor my room reservation. That being said, everyone makes a mistake. How you handle that mistake, to me, is the most important part.
I sent a note to Marriott using their website, regarding my June 13th experience, which started with, “You did something this week that completely violated my trust in Marriott.” I went on to point out that despite having a confirmation number, I was not only turned away from their hotel, was sent to a competing property, had to wait in line for over an hour and a half, and this all began after midnight.
The Marriott website responded reasonably promptly with the statement, “Thank you for contacting Marriott Customer Care regarding the Spring Hill Suites Atlanta Airport Gateway. We appreciate the opportunity to address your concerns. We received your information, and it has been forwarded to the Executive Office of the hotel. The hotel’s leadership staff will research the incident you encountered and contact you within three to five business days.”
I give them a grade of B for the prompt response and a C- for pushing it to the hotel to research and contact me. What research did they need to do? I gave them my confirmation number and they didn’t honor it. The hotel did follow up, an Alisa Harvey, the Assistant General Manager…”as a kind gesture, I would like to purchase you 15,000 Marriott Rewards points.” I give this a C- as well. Her closing, “I hope that this experience will not stop you from staying with us in the future…” doesn’t move me either.
In my mind, the real burden is on Marriott the company, not the hotel. If you look up the summary of my stays at Marriott, you will see that as of now, I have stayed 636 nights in a Marriott since I have been a member. I have no idea how accurate that is, but it means I have slept nearly two years of my life at a Marriott. You would think that this would be important to them. Clearly, I could call one of the other chains and tell them that Marriott had made me mad, and as long as they put me at the same level as I currently am with Marriott, let me earn similar treatment with their company. If I did that, then that chain would have all of my business going forward, and not Marriott. I really didn’t want to do that, but if Marriott didn’t handle it right, that was exactly what I was going to do.
While I was on vacation the following week, I received a call from a Sarah Turkelson of Marriott International calling on behalf of senior leadership of Marriott. In her message, she indicated she knew the assistant manager had reached out to me and offered me 15,000 points, but wanted to know what else she could do to restore my faith. She said that the hotel wasn’t following their policy etc. Her closing was, “at your convenience, I hope you will return my call” and it seemed sincere. When I returned to the States, I called, a human answered, and it was an operator not Sarah. None the less, every business gets bonus points if I don’t have to listen to the message and then talk to a robot. (If you ever call Bovie Medical Corporation during normal business hours and a human doesn’t answer, then you will know I probably don’t work here anymore.) I left a message, and Sarah called me back a few minutes later. Now I don’t really know if she was a good actor or genuinely cared, but we had a nice conversation. I didn’t ask for anything additional, which she very well might have been able to grant me. But the bottom line is she satisfied me enough that I will continue being a reasonably loyal customer.
I give Ms. Turkelson a B+, the Spring Hill Suites at the Atlanta Airport a C-, and Marriott in general a B- for how this was handled. They could have done better, much better, without a great deal of effort or expense on their part. If they ask me how, I would be happy to tell them.
Safe Travels,
J. Robert Saron
President
Bovie Medical Corporation
Image courtesy of 89studio / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
