Marriott has trudged through the merger between themselves and Starwood by going from one poorly handled situation to the next. However one of the biggest blunders and PR nightmare was when, in November 2018, they announced the discovery of a huge data breach in their systems that may have affected up to 500 MILLION guests. In January 2019, they clarified some details and said the breach only affected about 383 million guests, including the unencrypted passport numbers for 5.25 million guests.
Marriott seemed to be in no hurry to notify people about this hack. As per their website “Marriott began sending emails on a rolling basis on November 30, 2018, to affected guests whose email addresses are in the Starwood guest reservation database.”
I didn’t receive an email until December 6th. At this point, Marriott still didn’t know what information was stolen for each guest but they did provide a link to enroll in the WebWatcher credit monitoring service. It took until February 16, 2019 for Marriott to provide a way to find out the types of your personal information that were released in the hack.
Continue reading “Marriott Is Still In No Rush When It Comes To Delivering Bad News”
