Is this a new annoyance on Marriott’s website?

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Ordinarily, I find Marriott’s website to be pretty user-friendly and mostly free of the kinds of glitches that cause me to want to rip what remains of my hair out of my head (I wish I could same the same about ba.com!) but in the past few weeks, I’ve noticed one particular oddity appear three times while I’ve been performing award searches and I like to know if anyone else has noticed anything similar.

The glitch

Here’s a selection of properties from a recent award search that I performed when looking for a single night in London:

As usual, everything in the search results looks normal and as I have a free night voucher worth up to 40,000 points sitting in my account, the St Pancras Renaissance Hotel was the property that caught my eye.

Unfortunately, when I clicked the “view rates” button, this is what I was presented with:

The tab may suggest that I’m being shown rates “from 40,000 points/stay” but with the cheapest room costing 40,000 and a further £120, that’s not the case. An entry-level room costing just 40,000 points per night was not being offered and every other room that was available cost 40,000 points + a cash co-pay or if paying just with points, considerably more points than was indicated.

Clearly, this isn’t a big issue, and I admit that I wouldn’t be writing about it had this been the only occasion on which I’ve seen this happen. But it isn’t the only occasion. This is the third time in the past couple of months that I’ve seen an example of this and on each occasion, it was a different property in a different country.

I don’t have screenshots from the first two times that I saw this glitch (or whatever it is) manifest itself so you’ll just have to believe me that this isn’t a one-off case, and I’d like to know if anyone else has noticed anything similar.

Has Marriott done something to its search facility that means that we can no longer assume that a property can really be booked for whatever number of points the general search results show until we reach the booking page?

I hope not because that would be incredibly inconvenient but if anyone can shed a light on this I’d be very grateful.