We've been owners for just short of 20 years, haven't been back to Maui since 2019 and we thought it was time to take the family back to Maui. We booked through owner services in February, got our confirmation, looking at the website, points were taken, and dates looked good on our end.
Fast forward to our trip in July, we go to check in and they say they can't find our reservation. They can't find us by confirmation number, or by last name, we're just SOL. They were able to find our next reservation 2 nights later when we move into a 2 bedroom to meet up with my sister-in-law. Luckily, we arrived very early, so when we called owner services in Florida they were still open, they found the reservation, and contacted the KOR manager and allegedly everything was cleared up. This took about 90 minutes. We left the resort for a few hours and returned at 4 for check in...and they still cannot find our reservation. I spent about 2 hours with the front desk getting absolutely nowhere. They cannot call owner services since they close 4 hours before check-in. The front desk can't give us a room because Mariott is very strict with giving out rooms, since I don't want to camp on the beach with my wife and a 4- and 7-year-old, I am told by the front desk to buy another night.
The following morning, I go down to the front desk and talk to the actual manager, she is able to find the reservation pretty quickly, she said the reservation was changed in their system back in February....the day we made the reservation. Owner services system shows the correct dates, KOR's system shows a date several weeks earlier that we were obviously a "no-show" for. To cover the 2nd night the resort uses more points so we have a place to stay until we move into 2-bedroom reservation. After talking with owner services, they basically say that KOR thinks that owner services and I are somehow trying to steal a reservation, and they are pointing fingers at each other... and we are caught in the middle wasting our precious vacation time.
Once we got into the 2-bedroom we were fine, trying to recover from the infuriating experience of the previous 2 days, but still pretty annoyed.
So moving on, and aside from the venting, I want to ask if other long-time owners have seen the quality that we expect (and were sold) of the Westin, to be seriously degraded:
Fast forward to our trip in July, we go to check in and they say they can't find our reservation. They can't find us by confirmation number, or by last name, we're just SOL. They were able to find our next reservation 2 nights later when we move into a 2 bedroom to meet up with my sister-in-law. Luckily, we arrived very early, so when we called owner services in Florida they were still open, they found the reservation, and contacted the KOR manager and allegedly everything was cleared up. This took about 90 minutes. We left the resort for a few hours and returned at 4 for check in...and they still cannot find our reservation. I spent about 2 hours with the front desk getting absolutely nowhere. They cannot call owner services since they close 4 hours before check-in. The front desk can't give us a room because Mariott is very strict with giving out rooms, since I don't want to camp on the beach with my wife and a 4- and 7-year-old, I am told by the front desk to buy another night.
The following morning, I go down to the front desk and talk to the actual manager, she is able to find the reservation pretty quickly, she said the reservation was changed in their system back in February....the day we made the reservation. Owner services system shows the correct dates, KOR's system shows a date several weeks earlier that we were obviously a "no-show" for. To cover the 2nd night the resort uses more points so we have a place to stay until we move into 2-bedroom reservation. After talking with owner services, they basically say that KOR thinks that owner services and I are somehow trying to steal a reservation, and they are pointing fingers at each other... and we are caught in the middle wasting our precious vacation time.
Once we got into the 2-bedroom we were fine, trying to recover from the infuriating experience of the previous 2 days, but still pretty annoyed.
So moving on, and aside from the venting, I want to ask if other long-time owners have seen the quality that we expect (and were sold) of the Westin, to be seriously degraded:
- I remember when being an owner meant something more than a regular hotel guest. Over the many hours being at the front desk I saw a regular hotel guest complain that their refrigerator was noisy, and they were given a room upgrade, no questions asked. Meanwhile they don't know how to search their own system for my reservation and eventually I'm told to pay another room. Instead of doing what someone in the hospitality industry would do, which is say, "We see that you're owners for a very long time, we can't contact owner services in Florida right now so we'll put you up in a room and we'll figure it out tomorrow when they open, enjoy your stay!"
- Cleanliness of rooms/facility. We found dust bunnies and hair on the kitchen tile floor, the bed sheets were torn in the middle. There were trash bags piled up in the hallway to the rooms, as well as piles of trash in the elevator lobby that sat for days. We were on the 5th floor and had cockroaches running around the elevator lobby, the roaches were eventually stepped on and then sat there until later that evening.
- Competent/empowered staff. They couldn't find the reservation because they didn't know how to search for it, they couldn't give us a room because they weren't empowered with that option, and they couldn't communicate with owner services because they close 4 hours before check-in starts. On more than one occasion hotel staff were on their phones scrolling tik tok, once when an employee entered the elevator with us to the next floor and then exited, not once acknowledging our existence, just scrolling with audio at full volume.
