According to a Marriott CSR the hotel portion of 5 night travel pkgs cannot be converted to new TPs with the new categories. I sent the following to Marriott's customer care dept. It will be curious to see if I get any response.
I just got off the phone with a Marriott CSR, I was trying to accomplish two things:
1) Convert my 5 night travel certificate (a cat. 6 from the month prior to Aug 18th) into a cat 1-4 post merger cert.
2) Attach the new cert. to an existing points reservation.
In a well publicized memo, Marriott stated that since, post merger, both cat 5 and cat 6 certs would become cat 1-4 certs. Since the owner of a cat 6 cert had surrendered more points then a cat 5, Marriott would return 30K MR points to the owner's account balance.
When I asked the CSR to perform items 1 & 2 above and to return the appropriate MR points to my balance, she informed me that my cert was an MVC 5 night cert and that there would be no return of MR points to my account. I mentioned the publicized memo and she articulated further, that since this was an MVC owner's cert Marriott does not allow any type of conversion to the post merger categories. In other words, not only was I to receive no points but I would be unable to convert the (valid) cert to a post merger cat 1-4 cert.
After being on hold for a period of time, the CSR returned and said that a supervisor had mistakenly deleted my cat 6 cert and because of this the supervisor would issue a one time exception new cat 1-4 cert that was then attached to my existing points reservation.
I have two issues with this situation:
1) There must be at least a thousand or more unattached old pre merger 5 day certs that MVC owners have currently sitting in their accounts. These were purchased with valid MR points from their accounts, so it would be totally irresponsible for Marriott not to have a standard means for converting these certs to new post merger certs. Clearly they have value and, as long as they are not expired, should be converted on demand to an equivalent new post merger cert.
2) Marriott, to its credit, deemed that 7 day catagory 6 (and 8) when converted, should be done so in a manner in which 30K MR points are refunded to the owner's account balance. Why, then, would they not treat the 5 night cat 6 or 8 certs in the same manner? I purchased a pre merger cat 6 for 250K MR points. A cat 5 cert, at that time, cost 235K. If you are to treat the 5 night certs in the same manner as the 7 night certs, I would expect to be refunded the difference between a cat 6 and cat 5 cert. So in this case 15K MR points would be refunded to my account.
