Did this get mentioned yet this morning:
Marriott Rolls Out High/Low Season Award Pricing Next Month Along With Other Changes
...Peak and Off-Peak Pricing Go Into Effect September 14...
Another nugget in here:
New Limits on Points Advance Bookings
- Points advance locks in the room not the rate. Effective September 14 pricing that will apply to points advance bookings will be the current price at the time the member actually redeems points to cover the reservation.
- Maximum of 3 Points Advance bookings at a time Marriott will be updating their terms to limit members to three points advance bookings at a time. Expect to hear from Marriott if you make a bunch of points advance reservations.
While these changes are unfortunate - I think the changes are a result of people absolutely abusing the points advance to death. I don't blame Marriott, unfortunately I blame the public and bloggers who taught people to abuse the system.
I had not yet, thanks for the link, it's been funny and depressing at the same time.
A few highlights from me:
Peak and Off Peak Dates Will Be Balanced
When Marriott first announced the new program Senior Vice President David Flueck
told me, “We’ll make sure there’s a lot of equity in a market, in general roughly the same number of peak nights as off peak nights.”
... There will be more standard pricing dates than peak and off peak dates, with a fairly even distribution of peak and off peak,...
Well that seems reasonable, where's the Bonvoyed?
however that will only hold across the Marriott hotel portfolio as a whole and not necessarily for each individual property.
Ah, there it is. #Bonvoyed - when 15% of the hotel portfolio goes peak at 35-50k locations, 10% at the crazy 60-80k bucket list spots, and then 25% goes off-peak at low tier properties in East Jabip and the West Bumbles. That's seems like a fairly even distribution.
Marriott will be the one to designate high and low tier dates for each property. This affects how many points they charge you, the member, for an award stay not their reimbursement of hotels.
Also, they'll be doing this on a monthly basis so there's no advance chart you can check for the year. As they see where the volumes are for a hotel they can adjust to require more or less points for an award stay. The result of this is:
As a result when you check the redemption cost for a hotel stay, and come back at a later date to book it, the price may change even though the same standard rooms are available.
This does make sense for them, as that seems how they were doing the points savers specials and what not to direct traffic, but being able to charge more points to curtail traffic is new. Apparently with SPG the hotels would set the peak/off peak themselves, now the Bonvoy program is doing it for all to curb their program costs. As Gary Leff put it so succinctly, "Marriott is working to ensure that rooms that cost them more cost you more too."
However, this means you'll want to grab a reservation when you see it at standard pricing and then stalk to see if it goes off-peak. Likewise, if your standard pricing goes peak before you book it, then you'd have to stalk to see if it goes back to standard. (It's conceivable that it will happen at some locations if they're doing the changes on a monthly basis)
Here's the big Bonvoy BUT to that, as pointed out -
- Points advance locks in the room not the rate. Effective September 14 pricing that will apply to points advance bookings will be the current price at the time the member actually redeems points to cover the reservation.
So once peak/off peak goes into effect, points advance booking are only helpful if you were going to stay at that location no matter the points cost.
The one silver lining out of the whole article is they will supposedly honor some points advance bookings made prior to Sep 14 at the standard rates.
Marriott tells me that for reservations made prior to September 14 they will honor up to 5 points advance bookings at the standard rate even if those reservations fall on a peak date.
After Sep 14 they won't even allow more than 3 points advance bookings on an account.
That doesn't seem like we've been Bonvoyed enough
Change to How 5th Night Free Prices Work
Ah, there we go. They're not calling it "5th Night Free" anymore, it'll be "Stay for 5, Pay for 4" and you'll get to pay for the highest 4 nights of your booking and they'll generously pick up the tab for the lowest night.
I'm sure we could have been Bonvoyed worse, but I'm feeling like not by much.