Mr. Travelerswife had a similiar experience except that they did expire all his points with no warning (except that it IS in the fineprint somewhere, I finally found it b/c I couldn't imagine a business would be so cut and dry about this type of matter). They said they would give us 5000 back, up to half, for every night we stayed. Stayed a few and got no extra points, argued, lost......Started staying almost exclusively at Marriott. We have since earned over 4 million Marriott points and done over 1000 nights with them. We've never looked back. The warning is nice as most chains aren't so strict.