Hotels are full and hotel promotions are less generous. But since we’re past the packed summer months, with kids back in school, we at least do have hotel promotions. Marriott is now out with theirs for stays between September 21 and December 15. Registration required.
- 2000 bonus points per eligible stay, starting with the second stay
- Plus co-brand cardmembers earn 2000 bonus points per eligible stay at a different brand, starting with the second brand
This is remarkably ungenerous. 2000 points is worth about $12. And you only get that beginning with your second stay during the promotion period. It’s better for short stays at cheap properties, of course. In my view it’s weaker than other weak current offers,
- Hilton is offering double points starting with the first stay plus 2000 points for stays that end Monday through Friday.
- Hyatt is offering double points on stays of 2 or more nights
You should register now – while the offer is in front of you, so you don’t forget and in case you happen to have any Marriott stays. You’ll never remember to come back and do it later.
Marriott says I am not eligible to register for this promotion. Is this a global promotion open to all Bonvoy members?
I find the best hotel that fits my needs and the preferred location. The deciding factor for me is best price, or “bang for the buck”. If I can save $50 a night, why would I care about Marriott’s Chump Change offers. Points and loyalty with Marriott is a thing of the past. They have done everything they can to drive away customers and destroy the once mighty SPG program. Marriott can burn in hell as far as I’m concerned.
Those additional 2000 points are at a different brand once per brand. Otherwise it wouldn’t be a bad promotion, at least not by Marriott standards.
“Marriott Bonvoy Credit Card holders will earn the additional 2,000 bonus points only once per participating Marriott Bonvoy hotel brand during the promotion earning period”
I received the “You are not eligible for this promotion” message as well.
@y’all – just go into your MR account and click on the promotions tab. The direct link Gary provided did not work for me but the promo was showing in my account. It took FOR. E. VERRRRR. to load, and after I “registered” it showed an error message, but clicking back through to the promos page it showed me as registered (with a points earned tracker) so I think I’m good. Typical fun times in MR IT world!
LOL. Since when do 2x promos become “weak”? With their promos, a Hilton Diamond paying with the AMEX Aspire card will earn 44x, while a Hyatt Globalist paying with the Chase WoH visa will get 15.5x. Hardly the weak sauce that it’s claimed to be, and orders of magnitude better than this BonVoy garbage.
Please be real. SPG was never the great program that it was purported to be, which is precisely why it went belly-up, falling off from the pedestal on which it was inexplicably hoisted by self-anointed “travel gurus.”
The demise of mighty SPG would suggest reverse economic Darwinism, but there is no such thing. In virtually all human endeavors, it is the weakest that perish, not the “mighty”.
G’day.
Marriott needs to throw out some promotions that reward actual spending. Hilton often does 2x or 3x points earned rewarding elites that frequent high end properties and run up bigger bills.
This promotion benefits most the person that stays one night in a low end property from a relative value perspective
Marriott is just doing a poor job marketing itself with these promotions. These don’t influence bigger spenders but it could help some of the lower end brands in Marriott
You have to wonder who Marriott expects to attract with such a paltry offer. I guess I’m a pretty typical business traveler: I have a few meetings in the coming months, most of which are in places with Marriotts and Hiltons within a short distance away from each other. (And, of course, with Hyatts mile out of the way or nonexistent). The quality of the rooms and service at both brands are pretty comparable in these cities– I’ve had good and mediocre experiences at both.
I already have Marriott Platinum status and am about to have Hilton Diamond. Why on earth would I opt for the Marriott properties when I can earn double points + 2000 bonus points at the Hiltons? The only thing this “promotion” accomplishes is encouraging me to stay at Hiltons.
How “ungenerous” is this BonVoy promo? This “ungenerous”…
From the Marriott T&C on this promo:
i.e., award stays are not eligible for the promo.
From the Hilton T&C on its promo:
It means that I can do a weekday award stay at the cheapest Hilton hotel without spending a single penny and I’d earn as many points (2,000) as for the BonVoy promo!
@DCS I don’t think the references to “mighty SPG” and its demise as a company indicate any “reverse economic Darwinism”, but instead are just a good example of applied stakeholder theory. Customers – the folks who comment on this blog – absolutely loved SPG because they got a bunch of great treatment. But those customers were only one piece of the puzzle, one of the five forces, and other forces which were more dominant drove SPG to roll into a larger entity. The SPG program may have truly been “mighty” in the eyes of its customers, but it wasn’t economically viable in its own eyes.
A distinction without a difference. So-called “customers – the folks who comment on this blog – were brainwashed by this blog and others into “loving” SPG based on made-up “standards of excellence” that attributed to the program benefits that it never offered, like “guaranteed” suite upgrades, which was a myth, leading to “greatness” that it did not deserve.
The reality, which every blogger was well aware of, was that SPG awards, especially at very high end (“aspirational”) properties, were by far the industry’s most expensive (by an order of magnitude relative to the competition) and unaffordable. That is why the starpoint became more popular as a hotel points currency to earn on the SPG AMEX, without every setting foot in Starwood hotels, and then to redeem for free airline tickets — a double whammy and flawed model that squandered every advantage of the chain’s loyalty program as its “cash cow” and contributed to its demise.
The starpoint, touted as the “single most valuable hotel points currency”, was actually the least valuable (by about 25%, which I can prove mathematically). Like I said, folks were brainwashed into “loving” one of the least rewarding hotel loyalty programs in the industry, just as they are now being conned into “loving” WoH, a subpar program with a tiny footprint, very few rewarding promos, no 4th or 5th award night free perk — the single most valuable in hotel loyalty — etc.
Starwood/SPG went belly-up because of straight economic Darwinism: it was a conceptually and structurally weak endeavor that was mindlessly hoisted by self-anointed “travel gurus” onto an undeserved pedestal.
G’day.
It took me one quick tap in the Bonvoy app to register. It may not have been worth even that much effort.