Tag Archives for marriott.
Marriott Bonvoy free night awards are increasingly not free at all, with some hotels adding resort fees of nearly $200 per night even on points stays. That exposes the core conflict in hotel loyalty: chains promise value to guests while trying to lower costs for hotel owners, and eventually that contradiction breaks trust.
A Marriott hotel offers 50 Bonvoy points—about 30 cents—to skip daily housekeeping. The original 500-Starpoint pilot paid 30 times more.
Marriott Bonvoy is facing a class action over award nights that appear to cost only points, but later add mandatory resort or destination fees. The lawsuit says Marriott hides the true cash cost of “free” nights, even though paid stays show all-in pricing — and the app can still claim taxes and fees are included when they are not.
A Marriott guest used mobile check-in, arrived at the Fairfield Inn East Hartford, and found the hotel closed — with other would-be guests standing in the parking lot too. And Marriott’s Ultimate Reservation Guarantee does not apply when the hotel is not open, which is exactly when guests need it most.
A Black Ohio man says a Marriott hotel canceled the room he booked for his family on Super Bowl Sunday, then told him “You people” were not allowed to stay there and called police when he challenged the decision. The new federal civil rights lawsuit turns a viral hotel dispute into something much worse for Marriott: not just a claimed no-locals policy, but an allegation that geography was used as a cover for explicit racial discrimination.
Marriott just made its free night certificates easier to use by letting Bonvoy members add up to 25,000 points instead of 15,000. That sounds like a win — and it is more flexible — but it also says something less flattering: hotel redemption prices have climbed so much that you now need extra points to book many of the same stays these certificates used to cover on their own.
Marriott hotels keep quietly selling rooms on Airbnb—often hundreds of dollars cheaper than Marriott.com—despite corporate efforts to stop the practice. Here’s how to snag these secret deals.
Marriott has quietly removed the freeform “special requests” text box from its website bookings, leaving only a handful of preset checkboxes. Hotels may have ignored many notes anyway, but eliminating the field doesn’t eliminate guest needs—it just pushes everything into last-minute phone calls and check-in friction, with no easy way to message the property in advance.
A rumor is spreading that Marriott is buying Rosewood—an enormous deal if true, and one that would immediately raise questions about how Rosewood could fit inside Bonvoy.
But the story rests on a screenshot of an alleged internal Marriott legal email that reads wrong, while credible reporting points instead to Rosewood exploring a partial sale or specific assets—not the brand itself.
Guests at a Marriott in Newport Beach say the hotel shut off the water for repairs—leaving rooms with no working toilets or showers and sending people to an outhouse in the parking lot. A reader says there was no advance warning before arrival, and when they complained they were offered 10,000 Marriott points, even as the hotel continued charging full price for a stay without a functioning bathroom.
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 »
