Frequent Miler on the Air - How to fix Marriott Bonvoy | Coffee Break Ep87 | 1-13-26

Episode Date: January 13, 2026

Greg recently had two great stays at Marriott Bonvoy hotels in South Florida: The Ben, The Belgrove Resort. But the fact that these positive experiences surprised him (and that they were kind of the exception to the rule) prompted some ideas on what's wrong with Bonvoy.(00:12) - Great stays at Marriott Bonvoy hotels in south Florida: The Ben, The Belgrove Resort(01:59) - What's wrong with Bonvoy?(09:31) - Potential solutions(14:53) - If we could pick just one fix, which would it be?Visit https://frequentmiler.com/subscribe to get updated on in-depth points and miles content like this, and don’t forget to like and follow us on social media.Music Credit – Beach Walk by Unicorn HeadsMentioned in this episode:Check out this month's sponsor and support our showJoin the loyalty program for renters at joinbilt.com/mileshttps://joinbilt.com/miles

This is a Voyescape podcast. You can find all of our travel podcasts from around the world atvoyescape.com. Welcome to Freakimilers Coffee Break, where we focus on a single topic related to miles and points. And each coffee break is limited to 20 minutes or less or your money back. How to Fix Marriott Bonvoy. I recently had two great stays at Mariet Bonvoy hotels in South Florida. They were The Ben and a new resort called the Bell Grove. I got good value from points as well as free night certificates.

Both hotels proactively offered me free breakfast because of my elite status. Both hotels offered me 4 p.m. late checkout and one was a resort, which according in Marriott's terms, they don't actually have to honor 4 p.m. late checkout, but they did, and that was great because we had a 6 p.m. flight that evening, so it was perfect. I even used a nightly upgrade award at the Ben and got exactly the room type I was hoping for thanks to that nightly upgrade award. Wow. I mean, that all sounds awesome. That's great. So why are we talking about how to fix Marriott Bonvoy? That's a great question. The reason is because I was surprised by this outcome. You're not the only one. Everybody listening was also surprised just to break the fourth wall, so to speak.

It's like when an American Airlines flight I take actually departs and arise on time. It's like that. You don't expect it to actually happen yet it did. And that's really the heart of why I think Marriott-Bondvoy does need to be fixed because so often we don't get the treatment that we should get from the Bonvoie. program. Yeah, and honestly, that affects the decisions about where I'd stay. I'd be more likely to stay at Marriott properties more often if I expected to have the type of experiences that you just outlined. Unfortunately, we can't usually expect all of that. So why not? What's wrong with Marriott Bonvoy? Yeah, I mean, there's so much, but we'll discuss a handful of things that come to our attention. first off, elite benefits are inconsistent across brands. And I mean, if you look in the terms and conditions and you look up like what is the platinum-free breakfast benefit, there are maybe a dozen variations based on which brand you happen to go to and or whether or not it's a resort,

all determines whether you'll get any breakfast at all, whether you'll get a $10 credit, whether you'll get a full breakfast. I mean, it's staggering how different the elite benefits are by brand. And that's just too confusing and disheartening for when you haven't been paying attention and you go expecting something and you don't get it. Oh, yeah. I mean, there's been times where I've really had an unpleasant surprise where I was like, oh, of course we get free.

Wait, we don't get free breakfast. Or, oh, it's a $10 credit per person. But both of us need to be standing here ordering. I can't just bring it back to the room and get the two $10. There's so many little variations. I agree. Also, even though there are elite benefits, they're not always enforced. Some hotels seem to just kind of make their own decisions and say, oh, no, well, you don't get free breakfast here because the restaurant is operated separately, even though it doesn't really appear to be separate at all. And the downside here is that Marriott just doesn't do anything about it most of the time. Yeah, I think that's the biggest issue. Like, you know, some other chains, like, are not. known to proactively try to enforce those kind of benefits across all their member hotels, either through a carrot, you know, giving them some kind of rewards for good, you know,

good treatment of elites or some kind of fee or whatever if they don't do what they're supposed to do. You know, if Marriott has a program like that, it's not working. There's too many, too many hotels that break the rules. And we've both experienced that many times. Another thing that I don't like is that resort fees are charged even on award stays. So Hilton, Hyatt, Wyndham, they all waive resort fees on award stays. Yet Marriott thinks, nah, we got to collect all the money we can. And that's just kind of a bummer because, you know, you're paying all these points and you want,

and it's called a free stay, but it's not really free when there are big resort fees on there. Yeah, and that's especially irksome when those resorts. door fees include things that are just standard, like Wi-Fi, you know, or coffee in the lobby, you know, and things that should just be part of what the hotel offers. So, yeah, I find that particularly irksome in those situations, too. But yeah, it's a free night award. It ought to be free. Come on now. And there are also, unfortunately, very few ways to earn Marriott Bonvoy points, at least a few good ways to earn Marriott Bonvoy points, I should say. There's lots of ways you can earn them, but few of them are good.

So, you know, the points, and that's because the points are really only worth about three quarters of a cent, generally speaking, towards hotel stays or saying 0.75 cents or so towards your stays. So transferring one to one from MX membership rewards or Chase Ultimate rewards or built points, it's just terrible value. You're getting less than a penny per point. You could just cash those points out in many situations for one cent each and pay for your hotel stay rather than only get three quarters of a cent per point.

And the Bonvoy credit cards similarly offer two Bonvoy points per dollar, which is still the similar part is it's still a poor value. It's roughly equivalent to earning one and a half percent cash back, which you could do better than on a card with no annual fee. There's a number of 2% cash back cards on the market. So if your primary goal in using a Marriott Bonvoy credit card is to earn Marriott Bonvoy points, well, you'd probably just be better off with cash back. And so that creates a situation where there aren't so many good ways to earn Bonvoy points. Yeah, yeah. And just to be clear, when we say that points are worth about three quarters of a cent, that that's on average across, you know, many, many hotels and bookings. It's possible to get much better than that, but it's also possible to

get much worse than that. So just wanted to make sure that's clear. Great point. Another issue is around free night certificates. So, you know, there's a lot of credit cards that offer free night certificates, either annually or with spend or both. And each one is set to a particular number of points. Like the most common one is these 35K free night certificates that can be used at hotels that cost up to 35,000 points for the night, and then you could get that room for free. Or they do allow you to add up to 15,000 points to a booking like that.

So you could actually book a stay that's up to 50,000. 50,000 points. The frustration is that often the hotels we actually want to book are like 52,000 points for the night, you know, and they're just above that threshold where you can't even use points to top it off to use your free night certificate. So that's more of a frustration than, you know, something sort of broken about the program, but it's still annoying. Yeah. And finally, the final thing that I think is really just broken, broken is the nightly upgrade awards don't clear until just days before your stay. So at most brands, if you get those nightly upgrade awards, this is a choice benefit, by the way, when you reach 50 elite nights with

Marriott, you can choose five nightly upgrade awards. The idea being that you can use each of those to upgrade a night at a hotel to a better room, potentially a suite or something like that, at Ocean View, whatever it is that matters to you in that case. But the problem is that those don't clear until five days before the stay. And they use some, I say five days before the stay. and most brands, some brands only three days before this day, and they use some complicated algorithm behind the scenes. So it's not even a situation where if the room you want is available five days before the stay, you're going to get upgraded to it. No, no, no. There's some complicated algorithm on the back end that looks for availability every day and, you know, updates you sometime during the afternoon

until like 2 p.m. the day before your stay. And if they don't clear, they just get put back in your account and that happens to a lot of people a lot of the time and it makes it hard to plan on those. You can't guarantee that you're going to have a suite and plan on that reservation if that's what matters to you. Yeah, exactly. I find that so annoying because like, you know, let's say you're planning a big vacation and maybe an ocean view is really important to you. You won't even know whether you'll get it or not if you, you know, book a standard room and then use one of these nightly upgrade awards until like a few days before. And it's probably within the cancellation deadlines by that time.

So actually, you don't even necessarily know a few days before because they check each day until the day before and then they give up checking. So, you know, imagine the alternative. If they were just clear right up front, you'd be all excited about your stay. Instead, you might look at other options for booking hotels because that, you know, ocean view is important to you in this example. So regular listeners know that we love transferable points. And Bilt has a terrific set of transfer partners, Hyatt, United Airlines, Alaska Airlines, Air Canada, Air France, and many more. You can earn Bilt points paying rent and at restaurants, fitness studios, pharmacies, online shopping, and more. And now, starting in February, Bilt members can earn points on mortgage payments too.

Join the loyalty program for renters at joinbilt.com slash miles. That's J-O-I-N-B-I-T-com slash miles. Make sure to use our URL so they know that we sent you. Yeah. All right. So given those issues, how would we fix us? Yeah, well, there are a number of solutions we have. The first up, obvious, easy one is make elite benefits consistent across all brands.

For instance, all hotels offer free breakfast daily for two people. people. Actually, I, that even bothers me a little bit because we travel as a family of four and most other chains will allow for up to two elite members, two adults plus kids in the same room. And at Marriott, I have to pay for the kids for breakfast. So I like it to be two adults and two kids per room or all of the registered guests in the room, Marriott. But at any rate, all brands is super important because there are so many brands where either you don't get breakfast or you have to choose it as a welcome gift and they'll automatically try to give you the points at check in if you don't know to ask for it. It's such an inconsistent experience. So

make that consistent, Marriott. Yeah. And you know what? If you had to have an exception, just make it one brand. Now, see, I understand they're they try to get independent hotels to join Marriott with like sort of a light touch, you know, uh, touch. So it's really just a marketing channel for them. And so Marriott doesn't have a lot they can do to enforce things like this. And so just force those all into one brand so we know if we book, you know, Marriott Independent Collection or whatever that, you know, all bets are off. But as things stand now, it's crazy. I mean, there are so many brands and so many exceptions that it's just unworkable. Another thing I'd love for them to do is actually have a central program to encourage hotels

to honor the elite benefits they're supposed to honor, maybe explain to the hotels what they're supposed to do because it's very clear to me from some of my stays that the hotels misunderstand the terms and conditions, and then provide incentives or fees or whatever to make sure that those things really happen, I think would be really great. Yep, I think, Marriott, you need to waive resort fees on award stays,

and or waive them on all stays for high-level elites. I mean, Hyatt does that with globalists. Globalists don't pay resort fees. Nobody pays them on award stays, and globalists don't pay them on paid stays either. So I think there should be an opportunity to waive those resort fees for your most loyal guests. And certainly when somebody is redeeming the points they've earned

from travel for an award for a free night's day, it ought to be free. Come on. Right, right. They're so far behind the competition on that one. Okay. Another thing that would be really helpful is, you know, we talked before about how points aren't easy to earn at good value. Well, that's because points aren't worth much. And I think an easy solution is make them worth more.

And the way you do that is by reducing award prices. You know, word prices have crept up and up and up over time, and I get it. But if you want us to care about your points and transfer points from other programs to Marriott, We're not going to do that until you make your points worth more. So that would be a really awesome change. Agreed. And finally, clear the nightly upgrade awards at the time of booking. Hyatt implements this, makes it very easy to use their suite upgrade awards to upgrade to

upgrade to a suite at the time of booking to lock it in and know that you have it. And that would make me much more apt to use those and book a Marriott property if I knew I could get the room that I wanted at the time when I apply the nightly upgrade award. And again, like Craig said, it might not even be for a suite. It might just be that I want to make sure we get that ocean view or I want to make sure that we get the room that has the two double beds or whatever it might be. I would love to be able to have those clear at the time of booking. If the room is available to be reserved, let those nightly upgrade awards confirm it at the time of booking. You know, just that single change would make the difference for me.

So I have lifetime platinum status. So I have no reason to try to earn 50 elite nights or 75 elite nights. which are the two milestones at which you get the ability to earn these nightly upgrade awards. As SingStand today, I have no incentive to really, you know, change my behavior to make sure to get those. But if these nightly upgrade awards actually worked in advance, the way Nick just described, I think I would actually, you know, be incentivized to stay enough at Marriott's to get those every year for sure. One more thing is which would be really great is to follow IHG's model and allow unlimited top-offs to free night certificates. Like this 15K thing seems so arbitrary.

Why not just allow us to put whatever number of points we want to add on to the certificate? And then that way we can use them wherever we want to use them, even if they are priced at exactly 51,000 points or 101,000 points for those 85k certificates that were currently locked out of them. Be careful what you wish for, Greg. Those 52K places will suddenly, you know, cost 85K. And they'll be like, oh, but you can top off with 40,000 points. Good way. Be careful what you wish for there.

All right. So if we could pick just one fix, what would that fix be? And for me, it would be fixing breakfast, a breakfast fix. And this seems like such an easy ask. Just make it consistent. And I'm going to tag in there, the two adults and two kids and some of a family traveler, and I don't want to have to pay the full price for breakfast for two kids that sometimes don't eat anything. They just stare at a

pancake and don't eat it or whatever, or, you know, they're not hungry. And I hate having to pay the price for two buffets when the kids might eat next to nothing. So make that free for two adults and two kids with elite status. But more importantly, make it consistent across all the brands. This is such a big sticking point for me and such a problem, I think, in trying to get into the Marriott program, the fact that it's so inconsistent. And I say, you know, if IHG was able to do that, back when it was rumored that IHG might bring free breakfast for Diamond members across all the brands, I said, there's no way. There's too many franchisees worldwide.

They've got all these holiday ins and whatever else, but Crown plazas that aren't used to offering that. And they got to get everybody on board for that. I don't think they can do it. And lo and behold, IHG did it. Marriott, come on. If IHG can do it, so can you. Yeah, no, exactly.

Yeah, if I had to pick just one, it would be the same. that's such a cause of frustration and confusion, you know, it, but it's so hard to just pick one because I don't know what good that is without also, yeah, I'm doing something to enforce the elite benefits across the world. So they could state, everybody has to do it. But as things stand today, that's true. They wouldn't, they wouldn't do it. You know, 90% of the hotels would be like, well, you know, you told me to do it. Okay. But I'm going to keep doing what I'm doing. So, yeah, yeah, I think you actually need both of those things to happen. I would also love the, well, I would love all those wishless things we just mentioned.

But the nightly upgrade awards, it would be really, really great if you would make those bookable or, you know, confirmable at the time of booking. That's a little wishless item. But if I had to change this one thing, yeah, it's the make your benefits consistent across all your brands. I mean, the whole reason to choose a chain hotel over a boutique hotel of some sort or a small independent hotel is for the consistency. make breakfast consistent. There you go. Don't forget, if you've enjoyed this and you'd like to get on our email list,

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