Originally Posted by FozBoy

No, there is no assurance that if you book well in advance your SNA's will clear. That's because SNA's are trumped by paying reservations.

Up until the day the SNA sweep takes place, all the suites on the SNA are available for booking by paying guests, so you might very well have filed your SNA request months ahead and still get nothing… and because you've filed your request way ahead in anticipation of your wedding anniversary or your birthday celebration you missed the opportunity to apply SNA's on all the other stays you booked in the meantime… and so at the end of the year you basically got nothing or close to nothing off of this supposedly great SNA certs.

There is of course an easy way around this, and Starwood with its scheming worthless SNA benefit really deserves to have the taste of it: when you book your stay just book with a flexible / cancelable rate ALL the suites available in the pool of suites for SNA's, so no suites are available for booking by paying guests during the period of your stay. Then 6 days prior to your arrival cancel all those suites bookings so that when your SNA sweep takes place all, or almost all, the suites in the SNA pool show availability for the period of your stay and it's way easier for you to have your SNA's clear.

I have put an 8-day SNA request for a stay coming up in November and I promise that if those SNA's don't clear then that's what I'll start doing… with this SNA crap I feel Starwood is just taking me for a ride, selling me the illusion that if I stay at their properties 50+ nights every year I'll get 10 guaranteed upgrades the following year, when that's absolutely not true.

I hope Starwood changes this policy for one of guaranteed upgrades at the time of booking and, if that's what it takes, I for one would be willing to forgo guaranteed upgrades on award bookings, as they do on Marriot or whichever other chain.