Tag Archives for marriott bonvoy.
Marriott has a series of promotions running for a week that starts today under the banner of “Week of Wonders”. There’s a sale on paid rates, a bonus offer for making a home booking, and the biggest in my view is all hotels at off peak rates and over 7000 Marriot properties are participating in this.
Booking category 7 hotels for 50,000 points per night, and category 8 hotels for 70,000 points, especially where fall is normally peak season is an amazing deal.
The J.W. Marriott Phuket, whose ownership group also has the St. Regis Bangkok, believes that Marriott is mismanaging their resort property. The hotel failed to reach budgeted goals between 2013 and 2018 and there hasn’t been a budget agreed to since. Even before the pandemic they were doing less revenue today than they were in 2013.
They want out of the Bonvoy program, and Marriott won’t let them leave.
Marriott announced a deal for $920 million dollars with its co-brand credit card partners. In exchange for the cash Marriott has extended its co-brand deals with both partners.
These deals aren’t just good for the travel company, they’re good for consumers. But there’s an interesting reason we’re seeing hotel chains access their loyalty programs for cash before airlines do the same.
We’re in a recession. We’re not traveling. Rewards credit cards that are optimized for travel may not be top of wallet. Cards that are optimized for heavily travel customers may also not match current spending patterns. We’re beginning to see brands and issuers adapt.
The property is slated to leave Marriott after today. It should tell you something though about the Four Points brand that the property is being required to invest in upgrades to meet Best Western requirements.
The question is whether Marriott is making a big mistake with such a modest promotion as hotel occupancy and rates begin to fall. This was happening even before coronavirus. The argument in favor of spending very little on promotion marketing is that bonus points aren’t going to move the needle when people are scared to travel (it’s why airfares went up after 9/11, only those who absolutely had to travel were taking to the skies).
Following a similar move already announced by Hyatt, Marriott is extending elite status by a year for residents of China and its Special Administrative Regions (as well as Taiwan so as not to get in trouble by differentiating it) due to the coronavirus outbreak and concomitant drop in travel to and from the region. This is based on account address date as of February 1, 2020.
Marriott is also extending Suite Night Awards and Free Night awards for these customers won’t expire points in these members’ accounts until February 2021.
In December Marriott changed its terms and conditions to say that category 8 high season pricing of 100,000 points per night is no longer the highest price a hotel can get.
It turns out that prospect was all about just a single hotel: the $7000 per night North Island in the Seychelles has now joined Marriott’s Luxury Collection. The hotel is now bookable at 365,000 points per night.
Several days ago I flagged the possibility that Marriott would be eliminating the great annual offer of 10 elite nights for booking a meeting at a hotel. Before the Marriott and Starwood programs were combined Marriott used to let you earn 10 elite nights per meeting with no annual cap.
Word on the street was that this offer would be going away entirely. And indeed a leaked internal communication from Marriott bears this out.
This year Marriott is sending Thanksgiving gifts to its Ambassador members. A reader shared that they received a cheese board as a Bonvoy Ambassador elite member.
It’s not clear why cheese boards are connected to the Ambassador level or to Thanksgiving.
Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel -- a topic he has covered since 2002.
Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »
