Originally Posted by
tods27
A few years back, I did some math based on my Marriott stays and came up with the conclusion that in order to meet the points thresholds, you needed to have Marriott status and pay with the Marriott credit card if you weren't staying in the higher end hotels much. I have 693 nights and only 930K points. One of my reasons is also that I spent a year in a executive apartment where I earned nights but not points. No lifetime status for me!
I actually split my stays pretty evenly between mid-level (FS, Ren, a little JW) and lower-end (SHS, FI and some CY) and wound up in cheaper, small cities and big cities. I hit the money threshold within three stays of the night's threshold, having had the cc for only a year at that point and never used it to pay for work stays, which were my vast majority. This made me feel like you needed an average rate to hit LTP on both tallies at the same time. You could accelerate by using the cc, but it wasn't necessary. If you are going to achieve LTP, you would likely have status for most qualification years. That makes sense.
The math is pretty simple. Assume 76 nights per year, Platinum status, two nights per average stay. (Mine was one night average, others I know always do four, so adjust for your specifics.) There would be ~9k welcome gift points per year, splitting between the amounts for different property types. On a $150/night average stay, that's 151.5k points/yr or 13.2 years to LTP. On a $200/night average stay, that's 199k points/year or just over 10 years to LTP. I have definitely paid these rates for some urban SHS and FI properties, and have paid much less for some remote FS properties, but these rates are pretty average for what I've spent.