Marriott Rewards: 500+ Hotels Increasing In Reward Cost

From 24 March 2016 Marriott will be moving 556 of its hotels up one category or tier in their rewards hierarchy. That’s the bad news. The good news is that 237 Marriott properties will be getting cheaper when they drop down a category or tier on the same date.

Full list of changes is here

As bad as this may sound this could have been a lot worse.

Firstly I can’t see any properties that are going up by more than one tier…so there are no horrific adjustments to any individual hotels.

Secondly, unlike with the recent changes to IHG Rewards, Marriott has chosen not to change the number of points required for reward nights at the different tiers – you’ll still need 45,000 Marriott Rewards Points for the highest tiered properties.

The increases will hit those in the US far harder than Marriott loyalists staying internationally as the overwhelming number of hotels going up a tier are in the US (full list is here).

Only two hotels are moving up to Category 9 so that’s some reasonably good news….

• Renaissance Boston Hotel & Spa at Patriot Place
• Glasshouse Hotel, Autograph Collection (Edinburgh, Scotland)

And three Category 9 hotels are actually moving down to Category 8:

• JW Marriott Hotel Rio de Janeiro
• Boscolo Exedra Nice, Autograph Collection
• Renaissance Paris Hotel Le Parc Trocadero

The Boscolo Exedra Nice – now a Category 8 property

Just 4 Ritz-Carlton properties are moving up in tier:

• The Ritz-Carlton, Denver moves to tier 3
• The Ritz-Carlton, Rancho Mirage moves to tier 3
• The Ritz-Carlton, Montreal moves to tier 4
• The Ritz-Carlton, Kyoto moves to tier 5

While 2 Ritz-Carlton properties will become more affordable:

• The Ritz-Carlton, Jakarta Pacific Place moves to tier 1
• The Ritz-Carlton Abu Dhabi Resort & Spa moves to tier 1

I recently visited the Ritz-Carlton Abu Dhabi and, although it wasn’t really my sort of property, at tier 1 level it may be worth taking a look.

The Ritz-Carlton Abu Dhabi – now a Tier 1 property

56 properties move from Category 5 to Category 6 which means they’re moved out of range of the “Free Night Certificate” that Chase Marriott Visa Card holders get each year. That is counteracted a bit by 21 properties moving down into Category 5 but that still leaves us with 35 fewer properties to choose from when looking to use the free night certificate. That’s never good.

Outside of the US the UK is the worst hit with 7 properties moving up a category….

…and just two properties moving down:

The Renaissance at Heathrow was always a joke at Category 7 (and still is at Category 6) so I’m not surprised that’s come down a category….but I’d love to hear the justification for moving the two central London properties up to Category 8 – they’re both now horrendous value for your points.

Bottom Line

I never like to see hotels going up in category and, whichever way Marriott tries to spin this, a lot more hotels are going up in cost than are coming down – and that’s never good.

Having said that, we’re living in times where airlines and hotel chains seem emboldened to put through changes to their loyalty schemes and award charts that they wouldn’t have dared to put through just a couple of years ago. As a result I’m finding myself using the phrase “it could have been worse” more often than I’d like to at the moment….and that phrase is true in this case too.

Yes, overall none of this is good news, but the fact remains that Marriott Rewards Points haven’t taken a serious hit in this set of changes and we don’t have to find more points when we want to redeem at top Marriott properties – if that’s all they’re going to do this year I’ll definitely take it.