Marriott Broke Their Own Website When Trying To Fix Their “29 Ways to Stay” Contest

by joeheg

I guess I wasn’t the only one to feel that Marriott managed to create the least interesting contest ever with their 29 Ways to Stay promotion. If you remember my post from the other day, this is the 29 day promotion where once you won an instant prize, you could no longer win another instant prize for the rest of the contest. Since the chances to win were greater than 50% each day, it wouldn’t take long for you win a prize and lose interest in the contest. If you played every day, your chance of never winning an instant prize until the last day were 1 in 268,435,456. Imagine flipping a coin and calling heads 28 times and losing every time.

The rules clearly stated you could only win an instant prize once:

Limit one (1) Instant Win Prize per person

That was, until today.

I was checking articles from today and I saw that Doctor of Credit updated his post about the contest:

Update 10/18/18: Marriott obviously realized nobody was going to play the game again if they could only win one instant win prize total. You can now win one instant win prize per day, terms specifically state: ‘Limit one (1) Instant Win Prize per person, per day.

I checked it out and yep, Marriott changed the rules of a contest after it started (is that legal?):

Screen Shot 2018-10-18 at 11.16.19 PM

This is very much not what this line read earlier this week. But OK, since Sharon and I had already won, what could it hurt to try to enter again?

But I wasn’t able to enter again, because the website was broken. Over and over I tried signing in with both of our IDs:

Screen Shot 2018-10-18 at 10.48.06 PM.png

Marriott broke their own contest website. {Sad Trombone}

Eventually I was able to get in under Sharon’s ID and guess what? She won again!!!

Screen Shot 2018-10-18 at 10.49.11 PM.png

So it’s true. You can now win once day. Well, if you can get the website to work.

I started getting this error.

Screen Shot 2018-10-18 at 11.13.40 PM.png

Eventually it got worse and this was the page that showed up when trying to enter the contest.

Screen Shot 2018-10-18 at 11.20.39 PM

I run a website and know that’s NOT A GOOD SIGN!!!

So, I’d recommend trying to play the contest at https://29ways.marriott.com/. It may work, it may not. Eventually they’ll get the website to work and at worst you’ll have a 50% chance to earn 50 points a day.

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This post first appeared on Your Mileage May Vary

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