Once in a while there are "large" program wide changes that result in major point valuation changes. For example, does anyone remember when Marriott consolidated all their various brand programs into the single Marriott Rewards program? Before that, they had a single 200K award that included 7 nights at ANY Marriott hotel in the world, 2 airline tickets to get to that hotel plus an 8 day Hertz car rental (and I do believe they threw in a long distance calling card with minutes to call home with.) They quickly changed that award to the current TP award due to how easy it was to now rack up Marriott points (stays at all Marriott hotels now counted rather than just the FS Marriott hotels.)

There used to not be any CC points earnings. And then when Marriott first partnered with Chase to get a branded CC, there wasn't a Premium card earning 5/2/1 pts/$ only a base user card earning 3/1 pts/$. And the sign-up bonuses weren't close to 80K back then.

So basically it was a lot harder than today to rack up a lot of points. Today, even though Marriott doesn't have as many trading partners as some of the other hotel programs might have, they still have a lot more avenues to earning points than they used to.

We tend to glorify the "old" days of those 200K awards, but forget that very few people were really able to get the points needed for that award and even for those it usually would take a long time to earn it. It used to take me about a year to earn the 200K needed for that award. Today, if I focused all my hotel stays with Marriott, given all the earnings options, I could easily get a TP award plus be well on my way to another TP award if I want to stay at a Cat 5 or 6 hotel rather than a higher category hotel. So in reality, my true earnings is about the same.

So is it possible that Marriott might someday raise the points/$ earnings on one or more of their branded CCs? Sure it is. They did it with the advent of the Premium card, they might do it again in some future point. BUT, it probably won't be to just allow us to earn more points. It will be in conjunction with some other source of revenue change (i.e. high Annual fee or luxury card) or program devaluation. So in reality I'm not expecting and don't really want them to do it as it will most likely mean a devaluation of the overall program in some way for us is also in the works.