I can't speak for anyone else, but I have a few reasons.

1. I do have travel plans over the next 12 months that I have already planned out. A downward change in a hotel might be enough to make me rethink where I am using my points. (Yeah, every Marriott rewards member could go back and re-check every trip they have coming up over the next year or so to see if any of the hotels in the areas they are staying at dropped, but why not go to a single list of hotels rather than recheck each area hotel individually?)

2. If someone already has an award reservation and the hotel drops, they might be able to get some points back. (Yeah, I know someone posted that their reservation as automatically updated with points being redeposited, but personally I like checking every reservation personally just to make sure there aren't any "accidents".) But I guess everyone could also check each and every award reservation to see if any hotel they already have a reservation for has changed categories. Or if there were a nice listing of all the changes, those persons could check all their hotels at once rather than individually on Marriott's website.

3. I may have a Cat. 1-4 hotel cert to use. A Cat 4 to 5 raise would drop a possible location of my list of vacation spots. A drop from Cat. 5 to 4 might give me another possible location to look at. I guess after the category change I could again look at every possible vacation spot I thought about to see if a hotel is now useable by my cert. Or I could just look at the list of all changes to see what has changed.

4. Personally, I am wondering why Marriott didn't publish this list. They would have had to have it to make all the needed changes, but for some reason they didn't want any of their customers to see what hotels were going to change categories before the changes were made. I'd like to see just how many hotels (and which ones) changed up or down categories.

5. By being able to see exactly which hotels were raised and which dropped a category, we might be able to see some area trends. (i.e. if every hotel in an area rose by a category but one, why not that one hotel?) Due to this, I might change where I might have made an award reservation.

6. The list would have been of more value if we had it BEFORE the category changes as someone could have locked in a lower category level for a hotel they were thinking about. But this leads me right back to #4 and we may have at least one of the reasons Marriott didn't want anyone to know what these changes were going to be.