Marriott International

Reasons to avoid

1. In 2025, ICE used a Marriott-branded Sheraton in Alexandria, Louisiana — near a major deportation hub — to hold migrant families, including an Ecuadorian father and his 15-year-old son who were locked up for four days without phone or internet access. The detentions directly contradict Marriott's own 2019 policy stating it would "decline any requests to use our hotels as detention facilities."theguardian.com2025-08-19
2. For years, Marriott advertised low nightly room rates while adding mandatory "resort fees," "destination fees," and "amenity fees" at checkout — a practice found to violate consumer protection laws in multiple states. The D.C. Attorney General sued, Colorado settled in 2024, and Pennsylvania fined Marriott $225,000 for failing to comply with a prior agreement to disclose fees transparently.coag.gov2024-02-07
3. Three data breaches between 2014 and 2020 exposed the personal data of 344 million guests. Marriott settled with the FTC and 49 states plus D.C. in October 2024 — paying $52 million — after regulators found the company had failed to implement basic security controls including adequate password management, network segmentation, and multi-factor authentication.ftc.gov2024-10-09
4. Over 10,000 hotel workers at Marriott and other major chains walked off the job over Labor Day weekend 2024, demanding higher wages and the restoration of daily housekeeping — a service hotels eliminated during the pandemic and never brought back. The cuts reduced housekeeping employment by nearly 40%, leaving remaining workers to clean rooms that hadn't been touched for days while hotel revenues hit record highs.cnn.com2024-09-01
5. A 2025 report by the Uyghur Human Rights Project found Marriott operating hotels in China's Xinjiang region — where the U.S. government and multiple parliaments have recognized ongoing genocide against Uyghurs — and planning to open a Ritz-Carlton in Ürümqi in 2026. Marriott did not respond to the researchers' requests for comment before publication.uhrp.org2025-04-17
6. A federal class action lawsuit (Segal v. Amadeus IT Group) alleges that Marriott and other luxury hotel chains used Amadeus's Demand360 software to share nonpublic competitor occupancy data — allowing them to raise and hold prices artificially high rather than compete on market rates.topclassactions.com2024-03-01