Frequent Miler on the Air - Our Marriott Bonvoy Wishlist | Coffee Break Ep41 | 1-14-25

Episode Date: January 14, 2025

In today's podcast episode Greg and Nick will talk about the things they wish Marriott would add to their program to make it a really great program. They argue these things shouldn't even have to cost Marriott that much to implement. Read more about our Marriott Bonvoy Wishlist here. (01:24) - Fix the Platinum Elite free breakfast benefit Find our resource for figuring out whether or not you get free breakfast here. (05:00) - Clear Nightly Upgrade Awards from the time of booking (08:21) - Remove the 15K limit on free night certificate top-offs (11:11) - Waive resort fees on free night stays 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 Heads

Here we go. This is not your typical Frequent Miler on the Air episode. This is a standalone segment we're calling Coffee Break. Each Coffee Break segment will cover a single topic related to miles and points. And each Coffee Break is limited to 20 minutes or your money back. Enjoy. On today's coffee break, we're going to talk about our Marriott Bonvoy wishlist. What are the things that we really wish Marriott would add to their Bonvoy program to make it a truly solid rewards program? Yeah, you know, there are things that we think they could do to improve. And I think these would be big improvements that probably wouldn't have to

cost the program a ton or at least should be reasonable enough because some of their competitors offer much better options in the same sort of category. So we'll talk more about that in a second. Wherever you're watching or listening, don't forget to like this video. Give us a thumbs up. Don't forget to click the subscribe button so that you can get more of these shows every single time you're logging on here because we're publishing quite a few each week. We've got the full-length Frequent Miler on the Air, Coffee Break, and then a number of other things that are coming out. So there you have all that. Let's talk about what they can do. So what can Marriott do, Greg, to sort of win us over? What's on the wishlist?

The first thing I could do to turn Bonvoy from a bad word into a good word is fix their elite breakfast benefit. Tell me about it. Tell me about it. Here, here. They promise free breakfast, whether you're going to get a $10 credit, whether there's no breakfast for you because you made the mistake of staying at a Ritz-Carlton or one of these other exempt brands. It just goes on and on and on. The exemptions, the, you know, limitations and the, you know, it feels like penny pinching too when they say you only get like $10 a day towards your breakfast kind of thing.

Well, you know, the thing I think that's most frustrating about this is like, I mean, Greg and I are people who kind of, you know, eat, breathe and sleep this loyalty program type stuff, right? I mean, I'm constantly thinking about trips, planning trips, booking trips, writing about loyalty programs and whatnot. And I need to consult our database to figure out whether or not I'm going to get breakfast at a lot of Marriott properties, because there's A, so many different brands, and B, such variance in what you get that C, I can't possibly remember it all, and I'm somebody who does this for a living. So how could the average person possibly remember which ones? Because you do get breakfast some places. I mean, if you're a Platinum member, you'll get free breakfast at a St. Regis property, but don't expect it at a Ritz.

And you'll get it at a, I don't know, like a Westin. But if you stay at a courtyard, you'll get $10 per person. And if you stay at the wrong courtyard, they'll insist that both people are standing there at the cafe to use the $10 credit for both of you. How do you know this? Your wife is still in the room trying to take care of the baby. They're going to want her to be standing there in order for you to get $20 off the bill. It's just so, so annoying. Yeah. And you might say, well, shouldn't someone who has platinum elite status know the ins and outs of the program? But I mean, they give platinum status to people with the Bonvoy Brilliant card. It's not that hard to get to platinum status, which for a lot of people, that's a good thing. And it's a good thing when you happen to be at a place that provides good

benefits, but so many don't. And it's just ridiculous how inconsistent some of their benefits are, especially the breakfast benefit. And we should also mention that the breakfast benefit, like, so I just talked about a couple of different extremes, like places where you will get breakfast that are really swanky and where you won't get breakfast that are swanky and limited service properties where you'll get some credit and then full service properties where you'll get a breakfast and, you know, but it's not even that simple because then there's brands where you have to choose. You could choose to have like a coffee mug or a thousand points or a free breakfast for two every day of your stay.

And you have to know which one, because a lot of places, when you go to check in, one of my pet peeves with Marriott is a front desk agent who will say, oh, you want the points for the welcome amenity, right? And if you don't know that you need to select breakfast and you take a thousand points over breakfast for two, which might otherwise cost you 50 or 80 or $100 a day, depending on where you're staying. It's craziness. Craziness. Please fix this, Mary. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. All right. Next thing. What's the next thing they can do to make Bonvoy a less bad word? They could clear nightly upgrade awards from the time of booking. So if you earn at least 50 elite

nights in a calendar year, then you get a choice benefit at 50 nights and another choice benefit at 75 nights. And one of the choices is that you can choose to get five nightly upgrade awards. These used to be called suite upgrade awards, but Marriott stopped promising a suite. I mean, they started giving you more opportunity to use it on a variety of different meaningful upgrades. And so you could choose what type of room you would like to have. And so you could book a standard room and then try to apply one of these nightly upgrade awards and check off the boxes for which room types you're happy to take. But the way they work today is they don't even start looking for availability until we're back up to five now, right? Five days before check-in.

Five days for a lot of hotels, three days for some, others. And so this, again, it's sort of approaching their breakfast direction with this, how complicated it is. But regardless of whether it's today, three or five, that doesn't give you time to plan your holiday. Here you've stayed at Marriott many, many nights in order to earn this benefit, and their reward for you is you can tell them, you could tell the hotel. Applying these certificates,

which is like this great reward for all your loyalty, is basically telling the hotel, hey, it'd be really cool if I got an upgrade, pretty, pretty please. And Marriott will start looking either five days or three days in advance and you may not even get it then. And here's the thing, when we say they'll start looking,

like you might get on the website and you look and you find a suite, but that doesn't mean the computer's gonna find it. So just because one's available doesn't mean that they're going to upgrade you to it. So it's not even there's no guarantee. It's totally some algorithm that I'm going to say nobody knows how it works. Somebody must know how it works. But I don't know how it works because the room type you've selected for your upgrade might be available for booking.

But that does not mean that your upgrade award is going to clear. So it may, it may not. You've got no way to know in advance until like we said, three or five days in advance, which that's just not enough time. Because if I really want a premium room, I want one to know whether one of these things is going to clear far enough in

advance to make different plans if it's not going to. So, so anyway, yeah, it would be great to see those clear at the time of booking, which of course, Hyatt has long done. You can confirm a suite at the time of booking with a Hyatt suite upgrade. So Marriott, come on. And you might say, well, Hyatt's a much smaller chain, which is true,

so they can get away with other things. But look at IHG. I mean, they're huge. And now they don't do time of booking, but they'll let you clear 14 days in advance. And it's not a, you know, either clear or you don't. It's not a maybe it'll happen or maybe it won't. You'll know 14 days in advance if you try to apply your suite upgrade from IHG, whether you got the suite, and then you can make your plans around that, you know. And that's just so much better than how Marriott has it. All right. Agreed.

So. All right. Last but not least, what's the or next at least? What else could they do to improve the Marriott Bonvoy program? Third and final on our list is remove the 15K limit for topping up free night certificates. So, you know, it was great when they added the ability to add points to a free night certificate. When you have various Marriott Bonvoy credit cards, there's a whole bunch of them out there, but a number of them offer a free night every year.

Like, so there's a couple of them that offer like a 35K free night. And when you go to apply it, if the room is, if the hotel costs 35,000 points or less, you can just apply the free night certificate and you're done and you've got that room for free. If it costs, let's say, 40,000 points,

a really nice feature is you can add 5,000 points and book that room with a certificate plus 5,000 points. If it costs 51,000 points, that's 16,000 over the certificate value in that example, you can't book it with that certificate at all. This is another example where IHG can do it. I know, IHG, when they added top-offs, they just made them unlimited. You can add points to your certificate and boom, Marriott did not do that. And that is a big shame.

It is a big shame because, you know, that makes these things potentially really difficult to use, you know, and it's really annoying. It's not even just difficult, it's annoying when. It's not even just difficult. It's annoying when you run into situations repeatedly where properties are just like 1,000 or 2,000 points more than the maximum top off. And it doesn't feel like an accident when that happens, at least when it happens repeatedly. And I don't think it's necessarily the conspiracy

that it might feel like sometimes when you run into that problem a lot. But nonetheless, it's frustrating either way. So it would be great to see that cap lifted and the ability to top off with more points because then you could know you're going to get good value if you value staying at nice Marriott properties. And realistically, they should be encouraging that, right? Because that's what makes people keep coming back again and again, right? I mean, it's one night. So it's not like they're giving you some huge benefit for an extended period.

It's one night they're going to help you get for less, not for free even, but for less than what you would have spent for it. You would think that they could afford to extend that discount at any level. And just, I mean, you already can't get fifth night free when you're applying a certificate at all. So there's already, you know, limitations to how valuable this thing can be. And yeah, come on, just do it. But wait, I see that in your thought bubble, Nick, that you thought up one, another one, another thing that Mariette should do to make things better.

And if I'm reading your thought bubble correctly, I think this is our number one wish for Bonvoy. Yeah. I wish that Marriott Bonvoy would waive resort fees on free night stays. There is nothing I hate more than using a free night certificate or using my points for a free stay and then being charged a mandatory resort fee or destination fee or whatever you want to call it. I don't care. I don't want to have to pay it because I'm staying for free. It's supposed to be a free night stay. Hyatt, of course, waives resort fees on free night stays when you're using points or using a free night certificate. You don't pay a resort fee. Hilton waives their resort fees on free nights. Wyndham, I think, waves their resort fee. Wyndham does too.

Like, come on, Marriott. Yeah. Get with the program. Yeah. I mean, if you can't even be as good as Wyndham, then, you know. Right. Right. Nothing against Wyndham there, but.

Nothing against Wyndham for yourself, Marriott. Come on. Right. Right. Right. Right. You should be able to compete, Marriott. That's all.

You should be able to compete. It just stinks having to pay a resort fee and then tax on the resort fee on top of it. And so, you know, your free night becomes a $50 or $60 a night, which, hey, I mean, that might be a good deal for the particular property you're at, but it doesn't feel free to me anymore. And then I've got to compare against other options and feel like I'm not actually getting something for free. And I don't get that. I don't want to feel that way when I'm redeeming one of my benefits. And I wouldn't think that the hotel would want me to feel that way either so uh or the the brand at least so they just want my money though i guess they don't care how i feel all right let's get i mean it'd be nice to get rid of them all together

but at least on the free nights right absolutely all right so just to recap really quickly maria you need to waive resort fees on free night stays. You need to fix the Platinum Elite free breakfast benefit. You need to clear nightly upgrade awards either much earlier or ideally at the time of booking. And you need to remove that 15K limit on topping off free night certificates. You do that

and you'll be in our good graces. Absolutely will. Don't forget, if you've enjoyed this and you'd like to get on our email list, you want to go to frequentmiler.com slash subscribe to join our email list. Follow us on all the various social media You absolutely will.