Why I Dumped MGM Like A Bad Habit.

Double whammy of MGM suckage today, which led to a revelation.

I woke up this morning to an email from Mlife touting the benefits of my Pearl membership level. I say, "huh, that can't be right" as I'm a long-standing Gold member. So I go to work, open up my Mlife account and lo and behold, they have dropped my ass down to Pearl as of the 1st of this month. I figure this must be a mistake, I've made 4 trips in the past Mlife benefits calendar year and used my card extensively on all of them, staying in MGM resorts every time. Surely they wouldn't DROP my benefits.

So I send an email saying "hey, there must be some mistake, please restore my Gold level, blah blah". I get a form letter back saying I didn't spend enough in the past year to warrant staying at Gold, so I'm dropped to Pearl.

I had a 2-night comped stay booked for Monte Carlo for my Xmas trip. I was going to stay in an MGM resort, play MGM slot machines, eat at MGM restaurants.

I called and cancelled the reservation today.

This makes me sad. I kicked and scratched and clawed to get to Gold tier, and was proud of it. The benefits were tangible, and made me that much more a loyal customer. The double whammy is that as of Oct. 1st my points were wiped out so now I would be starting at zero to even begin to get back to Gold.

I've always had a love/hate relationship with MGM and Milfe. I certainly enjoyed not having to pay for a room the last 4 years of Vegas trips, and the fact of not having to probably made some of those trips possible. The comped rooms were usually on the low end of the MGM resort hierarchy, but that was understandable as I'm no high roller. Still, I regularly got 3 nights comped offers, usually with added resort credit or Freeplay tacked on, with the only expense being the resort fee.

Less reasonable was the tacked on room hold of upwards of $100 a night, even on rooms that had no in-room amenities. This was always refunded at the end of the stay, but it seemed arbitrary and untrusting, especially of a loyal customer like myself, and increased the actual amount I had to lay out at the start of the trip. The quality of my offers was going down in recent months too, as what was once 3 nights at The Hotel with big resort credit and Freeplay (guess I was a loyal customer back then) became 1 night at Monte Carlo with slap in the face "comp yourself with Express Comps" bullshit attached to it.

So I'm done. Done with MGM, Mlife, myVegas, all of it. Fortuitously, about an hour after receiving the death email from Mlife, I get a two-night offer from the Cosmopolitan, with the nights I was going to stay at MC available.

Booked.

For the Xmas trip I'll be staying at a Terrace Studio at the Cosmo and a Premier Room at the Palms. Looking at Youtube vids, the Terrace Studio looks to be the nicest room I'll have had in Vegas, with the exception of the Suite at The Hotel a couple years back.

MGM is in the rear view. I'll be keeping the Mlife card strictly so I can cash in the 75K "Loyalty Points" (hah) I have from myVegas for the Tender Steakhouse deal (maybe the only time I'll step in an MGM resort the whole trip?), then when all that is done after Xmas the Mlife card goes in the trash and the myVegas apps get deleted.

Adios, Mlife. Adios, MGM. Hello, whomever treats me like the loyal customer I am. Maybe after a year or so of me not booking a trip with them they'll realize they fucked up and try to get me back.

Nope.