Why are some Hotel Group Websites so Confusing?

Could cancelling a reservation be made a little easier?

So  I’m wanting to cancel an upcoming hotel stay at a Sheraton in Washington State. I log in to my Starwood account and access the My Account page. It notes that I have an upcoming stay in Bellevue, but clicking on the link only takes me to the hotel website. I search around for a while in order to find the actual reservation so that I can cancel it. I’m thinking that this should be relatively easy.

I check under Quick Links. Ah ha! A page for My Stays.  I access that, only to discover the same thing happens when I click on the link – I am directed to the hotel website.

Oh well. I decide to call the number listed on the website to see if they can just walk me through this. It is such an easy thing to do on other hotel websites and I rather like taking care of cancellations online. I explain to the CSR what it is I would like to do, telling her that I can see the reservation (sort of) but I can’t find a way to actually access it. Could she help walk me through it? Surprisingly enough, her answer was ‘No’. She said she couldn’t access the website from her terminal and would have no idea what it was I was seeing nor how to walk me through it.  Really? And no technical support?

She did offer the information that the confirmation email should contain a link for cancellation (search for said email would require a different computer but….).  I did see that I could resend the confirmation, which I did.  The link took me to Starwood Hotels, where I again had to access my SPG account, in order to cancel what I should have been able to cancel from my account to begin with.

Why does it have to be so confusing?