Marriott left a young family high and dry in Sin City — literally.
A dad has claimed that he, his wife and their 3-year-old were forced to spend the night sweating in their car after the brand-new Element & AC Hotel Symphony Park refused to honor their reservation — all because he didn’t have a plastic credit card in hand.
“The only reason: I had misplaced my physical plastic credit card,” the furious guest revealed to One Mile at a Time, slamming the chain for stranding them in the Vegas heat.
Instead of a cool Marriott suite, his toddler curled up in the back seat while mm tried to sleep in the passenger seat.
“My young child and wife slept in our vehicle on a hot Las Vegas night while I repeatedly sought help through every official channel,” the Marriott Bonvoy Titanium Elite member fumed.
The kicker? Marriott actually promotes “digital check-in” as a way to skip the front desk. But when this desperate dad tried it, he alleged, the so-called perk turned into a parking lot punishment.
According to One Mile at a Time, the general manager eventually sent a message that read more like a script than an apology: “I do apologize for not being able to check you in without a physical credit card being present at the time of check-in … At our property we do require a matching ID and Creditcard be run through our chip & pin machine … I do sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you.”
And when the dad escalated his complaint, corporate allegedly doubled down in a statement to him, with Marriott brass saying the Vegas hotel was “within its rights” to demand a physical credit card and ID — even while admitting their much-hyped “Digital and Mobile Check-In” doesn’t always mean you can actually, well, check in.
The company acknowledged the “inconsistency between the advertised amenities and the operational practices,” One Mile reported, but offered no fix, only noting the dad’s observations had been “shared with our internal teams for further evaluation.”
The guest didn’t mince words in his response — accusing Marriott of false advertising.
“When a company continues to promote a specific feature as an inducement to purchase, knowing it will not be delivered, the question ceases to be one of internal policy and becomes one of deceptive trade practice,” he fired back to the travel site, calling it a matter of consumer-protection law.
He stressed he wasn’t asking Marriott to scrap digital check-in altogether, just to be honest about it: update the amenity list and spell out that guests still need a physical card in hand.
“A straightforward edit of the property’s amenity list — removing ‘Digital Check-In’ or clearly stating that a physical card is always required — would resolve the inconsistency and protect both guests and Marriott from the risk of regulatory scrutiny,” he wrote.
The Post has reached out to Marriott for comment.
It’s not just one unlucky family catching flak from the hospitality industry, either.
As The Post previously reported, travelers around the globe are fuming after screenshots showed third-party hotel booking sites hitting customers with tipping requests before they even checked out.
And you might think slipping $20 to the front desk for an upgrade was old-school. But some luxury hotels are now cutting to the chase — practically shaking down guests for cash the moment they check in.
One traveler told the blog A View From the Wing earlier this year that they were “given a slip of paper pushing tipping along with their key when they checked in” at the Marriott LaSalle in Bryan, Texas.
And another reader, who admitted they’d once felt “smugly happy we don’t stay at Marriott very often anymore,” said their smugness didn’t last long — they allegedly were hit with the same treatment at Boston’s Hyatt Centric Faneuil Hall.
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