I reached out to Amex customer service to get the membership number. I have it now but I can’t sign up on the Marriot website or I’m being totally stupid right now??

I have been trying to link my Marriott Bonvoy account into my Amex for 2 weeks now. The first day, it failed and I called Amex support and was told the name differs from the Marriott side. So Amex said share a govt. ID and issued a new card with the exact name. Now both Marriott and Amex have the same exact first and last name. Tried linking again, it failed with the same error—“We were unable to register your Marriott Bonvoy™ Frequent Flyer account because the details you provided do not match the airline partner’s records”. Next I checked the email, phone and address and confirmed they are all the same. So now I raised support tickets on Marriott and also spoke to Amex. They said contact Marriott. So I did and they told me they cannot link account so I should talk to Amex. Amex kept telling me the error comes from Marriott’s server while Marriot kept telling me they don’t have access to Amex’s system to link my account.

I got frustrated and called Amex support and setup a conference call with Marriott support so the two agents spoke to each other and confirmed all my details matched in that long half an hour call. After all of it, the Marriott support agent gave me the standard response to drop an email and shared the same email where I was initially told to talk to Amex. On the Amex side, I was told a tech request will be raised to look into the matter and they’ll get back in 3-4 days. I wrote back to Marriot and this time I mentioned that the agents spoke and confirmed the details and still linking failed. I got a reply that they will refer to a specialist dept. who handles liaison with Amex. I said fine and waited and was given the same reply a day later to talk to Amex. Today’s the 4th day since Amex support told me they raised a tech support ticket (14th day overall since I first started the initial support query).

The agents of either platforms seem to be directing me to talk to each other and this isn’t leading to any solution. All the details on my name on card, amex account and address match Marriott and I feel it might be an issue where the server is combining address lines or something before comparing leading to some error. Without knowing the exact difference I cannot even amend the address to trick the system (such as putting all address lines in first—although I did try). I am looking for solutions and what to do to solve this because I want to transfer my amex points to bonvoy and reserve rooms at the earliest. There’s a limited 30% more points offer on Bonvoy going on as well which would help. Any ideas to get this done?

Update: I raised a support ticket to Head of customer support ([email protected]) explaining that I did a conference call and had all my details confirmed incl. first name, last name and address. They replied back after 4 days that the last name mismatches but without confirming what the last name was on Marriott or Amex side that leads to mismatch. Then I called Marriott and told them my last name on Amex and they confirmed it’s exactly the same on their file. So I replied back to Amex with the same and then after another 4 days they told me there is an extra middle name field with one of my names in it. So if my name was W X Y Z, so far they were telling me first name was W X and last name was Y Z, a record I even still can see in my amex chat support records but then in this last email I was told the first name is W X, middle name is Y and last name is Z. I called Marriott support and they updated it instantly. I then initiated a linking request and it was done immediately. So after 25 days of struggle, 55 attempts to link the accounts, 18 customer support calls spanning 2.5 hours of my life, 3 chat support queries spanning another half hour I was finally able to get this done. Phew!