Originally Posted by
phltraveler
In short - If you are someone who can spend $400 a night and stay 25 nights with a Marriott credit card ($10K marriott room rate spend), and then manufacture another $95K in other spending only on airfare/rental car/restaurants on the Marriott card, then you can hit elite status in Marriott Rewards with half the actual butt-in-bed nights, then yes - Marriott Lifetime Platinum is far easier. Most Marriott elites have nowhere near $95K in such spend to manufacture, and stay at room rates that are $200 or less (sometimes closer to $100) on average, which means that even with heaps of nights in excess of the 750 required for lifetime plat, they fall short on points. I would wager a large sum that the number of people that could consistently move such spend across the Marriott Card (much less the number of people who actually did so) to be a small portion of the elite population.
You touch on a very important point, but then gloss over it for your sample spend calculations to make the 2M seem much hard than it actually is. Promotions and bonus points have been a huge part of both programs for as long as I can remember, so in very few cases is the point calculation as simple as $x times the standard earning rate. My Marriott bonus experience is fairly limited, but in those cases, I earned a pretty significant amount of bonus points through various promotions. I just checked my lifetime Marriott stats and I'm at 21 nights and 116,063 points. I don't have the Marriott credit card and have never received a signup bonus on a Marriott card, so that number is just stay earnings plus bonus points. I pretty much only stayed during promotion periods since the merger so admittedly that number is somewhat inflated from someone staying year round regardless of promotions, but it still shows the flaw in a calculation that ignores bonus points.