Marriott has announced a number of major changes to its loyalty program. The changes are as follows:
- Marriott will move to dynamic award pricing from March 2022 and award chart will be removed.
- Marriott has said that 97% of properties will still price between the current off peak and peak pricing until the end of 2022.
- From 2023 there will be no limits on the amount of points properties can cost
- Fifth night free benefit will remain
- Ability to add points to free night certificates. You’ll be able to add up to 15,000 points to a free night certificate. For example if a property costs 65,000 points and you have a 50,000 free night certificate you can use the certificate and add 15,000 points.
- Elite status will be extended through February 2023
- Suite night awards, free night awards will be extended through June 2022
- Points will not expire through December 2022
Our Verdict
Marriott claims that adding dynamic pricing will increase award inventory, but unless the compensation better award nights and cash stays is fundamentally changed I don’t see how that will be the case. In addition there’s not much point in having increased inventory if all of that inventory is extremely overpriced. It’ll be interesting to see if Marriott moves to a fixed price redemption similar to Southwest or how they determine how much award nights will cost.
The ability to top off award night certificates is great, but the cap of 15,000 points is frustrating especially when award nights across the board are likely to get far more expensive.
Overall if you have Marriott points (or really any hotel or airline currency) you’re better off trying to use them sooner rather than later.
Any update on when the cert + points option goes live? I’d sure like to burn some FNA certs before dynamic pricing kicks in.
Marriott sent an email reminder that I have a FNA (issued last June!) and how to redeem it, fine print at the bottom clearly states that cert + points is not available at this time. Thanks for nothing.
called marriot cs, won’t help to extend for me now. CS agent said system will auto extend later, but not sure when.
Anyone know when free night certificates will be renewed? I still see it will expire 1/3/22. Thanks.
Ditto, still showing 2x expiring Jan 2022 and 1x expiring May 2022. Sadly I really need these extended to July for vacation, otherwise they are still pretty useless 🙁
Not holding out on yet another extension either, though this one is appreciated to get us back to warm weather!
I got an email from Marriott this morning which says in part:
“Hotels and resorts will still have a minimum and maximum number of points for redemption rates that will more closely align to how they’re categorized today.”
So maybe they’ll still keep their policy about pricing redemption rate minimums based on how many vs how few people redeem points at the hotel, like they now do?
The worst changes might still end up being at popular-for-redemption hotels, since they don’t have to publish the “maximums”. (Those were the hotels which already tended to require more points.)
The good values might still end up being at “who else but me would think of redeeming points here?” hotels, even during unusual events perhaps (if the “maximum” at that hotel didn’t expect an unusual event) which drive up cash rates temporarily. As an example: Unusual events includes the August 2017 total solar eclipse, which saw hotels which weren’t normally super popular but were near a good eclipse viewing location have “normal” redemption rates (until they were booked up, which often happened quickly, of course).
So this doesn’t mean they’re going to “true” revenue-based redemptions (a la Southwest Airlines). They’re just going to track cash rates WITHIN the minimums and maximums for a particular hotel, which is somewhat similar to Hilton, but the minimums and maximums will not necessarily be based as closely on cash rates as they tend to be at Hilton.
My guess is that Marriott is dealing with finding that “high and low rates” didn’t deal well enough (for them) with short-term variations in demand. Ie, “high and low rates” were the first step, and unpublished “minimums and maximums” are their next step past “high and low rates”.
And the getting rid of categories seems like it’s again because they want SOME hotels that used to be in category Q to be able to require category W rates sometimes, even though there are lots of other categories in between Q and W. They couldn’t do that while keeping categories.
So just because they’re getting rid of categories and getting rid of high and low rates doesn’t necessarily mean there won’t good value any more, it just may mean there’s good value less often (but not never).
So it says between 1/3/22 and 6/29/22… does that include an expiration date of 1/3/22???
yes
The ability to add points to FNCs seems like a positive, as it’s been something that has really frustrated me lately. I had a trip a few weeks ago for a large event, so of course all hotels were at peak pricing which was 40k and up. So my four 35k certs were worthless.
I have a similar trip set for next fall, and already it looks like hotels in that city are the same story – 40k and up. The question is whether I could book now with points, and switch to certs+points later on when this rule goes into effect. Or would I have to pay the potentially even higher points price (possibly above the 50k max for cert+points) at that time since pricing would go completely dynamic??
I’ve already been thinking about closing my Marriott cards due to the uselessness of the certs; how the details play out here will determine whether they remain useless.
I have free night certificates that expire in January 2022. So far that expiration date has not changed to June 2022 on my Bonvoy account, but I would like to use them for a booking in April 2022. If I booked using those certs today, would they be valid for the April reservation? Or put another way, would I get the cert extension if I used them now to make an April booking? I haven’t had much experience using these certs so thanks for any feedback.
You can call them to extend immediately. The marriott representatives are very nice and friendly. The Hilton people are totally opposite on the other hand, we had a family member contacted Covid, and myself is working in a hospital day and night combatting Covid for all of us, and yet the Hilton Executives office simply turned down my extending inquiry for only 3 more months with a big NO.
Arne Sorensen’s comment in Feb 2016 on Starwood loyalty program:
“ We’ve heard from SPG members loud and clear when they say ‘Tell me I’ll be OK,’” Sorenson said. “You’ll be OK. I want to make sure we continue to earn that loyalty.”
May Arne Rest In Peace along with this Marriott commitment.
I’ve been around long enough to remember Starwood. If you had told them that in a few short years their loyal customers were going to be a part of this dumpster fire of a program I wonder if they still would have sold.
They’d have been better off being sold to Anbang. Pains me to say but it’s likely the case.
Was thinking about applying for the Chase Marriott Boundless card this week. I guess that is not going to happen now.
Your loss. The free night cert SUB is now more valuable.
Lol, how? Every property outside of Nowhere North Dakota is going to cost 50-500% more within a year’s time.
Never mind that it doesn’t even take effect until 2023. 35k certs can be used at up to 50k properties in 2022. This is an upgrade for “within a years time.”