I got a real chatty diamond desk person earlier in the week, so I took the opportunity to ask about AXON post 3/28. Take this for what it's worth, which may be zero, but there's some potential nuggets of info in there.
Anyway, I found myself I need of an AXON7 booking yesterday. Given the discussion we've been having about whether one can cancel an AXON reservation and apply an AXON cert to a new reservation, I decided to give it a try. First, I took a reservation that I made a couple of months ago, for which I received via e-mail an AXON cert when I made the booking. Let's say that was at Hotel 1. I checked to see if standard rooms were still available at Hotel 1 for my nights and they were. So I called, and said I needed to cancel my AXON stay at Hotel 1, but needed a new 4-night AXON booking at Hotel 2 -- sometimes when I cancel AXONs the points get tied up for a few days, could they please just cancel my Hotel 1 booking and apply my AXON cert to the Hotel 2 stay.
No problem, she says -- so long as the AXON cert doesn't expire before the stay at Hotel 2. She converts it over, easy as pie. So, I ask, "will we be able to use these AXON certs for new reservations after 3/28 even if AXON goes away?" We at that point had a discussion whether AXON will go away, which I'll relate below, but eventually we talked about this question and she said that yes, her understanding is that old AXON certs will continue to be honored so long as they are not expired and so long as the hotel to which the cert is applied after 3/28 is in the same category as the cert. So, for example, if you make an AXON booking prior to 3/28 at a category 7 that turns into a category 9, you're ok. But if, after 3/28, you try to apply the cert to a category 9 or change anything, it will be a no go. But if you want it moved over to a new hotel after 3/28 and it is not going to expire, and the new hotel's post-3/28 category is 7 or lower, it could be applied. I asked whether one needs the actual cert number to do this, and she said they can see it in the system, so just make sure you tell them when cancelling the reservation to not cancel the cert. (Though it sounds like some of them just do it automatically.) She said, though, this wasn't official, and she was only making her best guess.
With respect to whether there will be an AXON after 3/28, she said they haven't been told yet, but they are assuming the answer is yes. She said her understanding was that there would be AXON6, AXON7, and AXON8, or just AXON7 and AXON8, and the point requirements would be going up. She said this was not official, just an assumption, and could change at any time, and also actually mentioned flyertalk and said they knew "there is a lot of panic over there about AXON."
So, anyway, that's my story. After moving my cert over to Hotel 2, I called back and re-booked at Hotel1 with 140k more points. (Which they deducted twice, but that's another story.)