Marriott's Megabonus promotions tend to be lame, but on the positive side they have some ongoing offers that tend to be pretty good. The Elite Exclusive Offers (available to Golds and Platinums) yield at least 5 or 6 free weekend nights per year just by calling and booking the stays. The frequent Bonus Buck offers lead to a handful of other effective free nights each year.

This makes it a bit hard to quantify Marriott's total benefit in a spreadsheet, as a good portion of their benefit is in non-points value.

The aspect of Starwood that is hard to quantify in a spreadsheet is that (IMHO) their properties tend to have more character/flavor than the typical Marriott.



Oh, and one last comment about the $500 flight cap: your travel policy may allow them, but everybody knows what a shuttle ticket costs. Don't be That Guy who continually rocks $400 shuttle trips when everybody else gets them for $170. Nobody likes That Guy. Upgrading NYC-BOS? That has so little value it's hardly worth discussing.

I've done the consulting-travel gig for many years, generally with a very liberal "book it yourself - just don't do anything stupid" policy. Clients still get the invoices and find out quickly who's either purposely milking the system or just an inattentive, inefficient traveler who doesn't care about client value. Don't be That Guy.