Marriott's breakfast policy is THE original reason I discovered Hilton Honors and continue to do enough in that program to retain at least Gold status, if not Diamond.

My first frequent-travel job was at a company that was 100% Marriott corporate rates worldwide. I was a high Plat and mostly loved it. On business trips, I don't really care about breakfast or really much of elite status recognition (as long as they got bed/smoke right, which they always did).

But on leisure trips, especially now with kids, I realized we want some sort of breakfast option - lounge or buffet, anything is fine. And with Marriott, that meant we could never redeem at anything they arbitrarily deem a "resort", or at an increasing number of properties that simply opt-out of status benefits.

So I started kicking some business stays over to Hilton. Got their credit cards, started working their promos, and figured out how to work their program pretty well. Got hooked on them back when Gold/Diamond upgrades were amazing....6 nights in Hawaii with a huge upgrade and great breakfast easily trumped Marriott's 7 nights with little/no upgrade and no food option at all.

In 2017, I'm doing 75% of my business stays with Hilton and 25% with Marriott. I'm frustrated by how unstable the HH program is compared to Marriott and SPG (three major devaluations in 10 years vs. MR/SPG programs that are structurally pretty stable). But they follow the devaluations with juicy promos, so I keep playing the game. I know I don't want to lose status there, because that's where most of our bigger family trips are going. I just need enough Marriott points to do the occasional Travel Package, and as much as I love TP's I'm running out of ideas for city hotels that I want to spend a full week in...