Marriott Eliminating Award Charts; Extending Status & Certificates

Marriott has announced major changes to its Bonvoy program. There were a couple of good things in today’s announcement, but overall, the changes aren’t positive ones with the announcement that they are eliminating their award chart in March 2022, and award pricing will instead be fully dynamic. 

The short story is that award pricing is likely to go up in most cases.

How the MileValue Team Is Using Our Annual Free Night Certificates

One of the often overlooked benefits of hotels’ co-branded credit cards are the free night certificates that many come with. In exchange for an often nominal annual fee, you're able to redeem these for a significantly subsidized (read: not truly free!) redemption if you're able strategize these well.

With many hotel programs extending the expiration dates on these free night certificates, many of us find ourselves with a number of certificates and looming expiration dates.

Anatomy of an Award: My First Trip To Florida’s Gulf Coast

I must admit, I’ve been to many countries throughout the world, but I’ve only been to Florida once in my life. So between the latest COVID-related travel restrictions that include testing before you can fly back to the U.S., and my need to escape the cold grey Midwest winter, I’ve decided that now is a good time to explore South Florida’s Gulf Coast. I was attracted by the wide, white sand beaches, mild February temperatures and opportunity to book some  very attractive properties with points.

Anatomy of an Award: My First (Hopefully) Post-COVID Trip to Hawaii

My last trip was February 2020. My wife and I returned home from an awesome week-long stay at Scrub Island Resort in the British Virgin Islands not knowing that it would be our last trip for a long time. We had tons of trips all over the world planned for 2020 that we would slowly begin cancelling one-by-one: 3 weeks in South Africa, a trip to Chile and Argentina, a few trips to Europe, and tons of domestic trips as well.

Like many of you, we’ve been pretty cooped up for the last year or so.

The Basics of Marriott Bonvoy


Today we continue our series on the types of credit card reward programs frequented by travelers.

Official Marriott & SPG Merger August 18: How to Prepare

We have been watching the merger of Starwood Preferred Guest and Marriott, and the details of what that merger will mean for both of those loyalty programs' members, unfold for a long time now. We first thought the merger would happen August 1, and then Marriott changed the wording of all their marketing/press releases to a more ambiguous "August". But now we have a hard date.

Book Top Tier SPG Properties Between August & December 2018

Update 7/6/18: The most expensive, off the award chart all-suite SPG properties will actually be bookable for 60k Marriott Rewards in August. Read New Marriott Award Category Assignments & Strategy Moving Forward for further info. 

In August of this year, SPG and Marriott are merging their loyalty programs.

Rake in Tons of Marriott Points for Doing Almost Nothing

Yesterday Marriott Rewards offered 1,000 bonus points for answering an NFL trivia question via replying to their Tweet.

Where is the Pro Football Hall of Fame? Answer with #RewardsPoints before 8pm EDT on 10/15 and score 1,000 points if you get it right.

Earn 1,000 Marriott Points For One Tweet Tomorrow

You can earn 1,000 Marriott Rewards for taking a few seconds out of your day to tweet the answer to an NFL trivia question tomorrow--Sunday, September 24. Well, maybe more than a few if you need to google the answer like I will as I know next to nothing about football.
How to Get the Free Points
Step 1: Connect your Twitter account to your Marriott Rewards account here.

Turn 83k Marriott Points Into 25k+ Of Almost Any Mile

When you're shut out from the majority of Chase cards, you loose access to tons of rewards and reward earning opportunities due to what everyone calls the Chase 5/24 rule. If you've opened more than five credit cards from any bank (with the exception of most business cards) in the last 24 months, then Chase will deny you for almost all of their cards (with the exception of these).