Photo: The US Grant, A Luxury Collection Hotel
As SPG and Marriott will have finished the highly anticipated merger by the end of this year, we could expect some news more often. Here is one rumor that just got out …
This morning (and Thursday night in China), user brain1992 on Flyertea (China’s leading frequent flyer forum equivalent to FlyerTalk), showed a screenshot of his chat history with someone working on the website integration of SPG and Marriott. If you can’t read Chinese, here’s the translation of the conversation:
Brain1992: Yes ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Friend: But the SPG APP and its official site will be gone after Aug 1st.
Friend: Not happy.
Brain1992: What?
Brain1992: You sure?
Brain1992: How come we don’t know anything about this?
Friend: Because we are doing the coding job about the merging of the websites.
Friend: The SPG website will go down on Aug 1st, and after that people will all go to the Marriott website.
Brain1992: OMG… The Marriott website is so ugly.
Now it shouldn’t come as a surprise if the consolidation is completed this year. Yet what makes us wonder is: August 1st, really? That translates into an extremely tight schedule, especially given it is almost April now. If Marriott decides to launch the new system in August, it seems surprising that no official announcement has been made yet.
What’s more, integrating into a single website would probably mean the end of Starpoints as we know it (after all it would create considerable operational burden if two point systems are in use), but still we have no clue. Oh, don’t forget the credit cards: we only know the arrangement that Amex will be issuing a top-tier card while Chase will offer a mid-tier card and a card without annual fee.
So if we had to guess, we tend to think August 1st is the launch date of a new beta website. Offloading the SPG website/app entirely in early August seem unlikely.
But who knows? The day will come sooner or later. Let’s wait and see.