Originally Posted by
mahasamatman
I was looking for multi-day stays, which is why I saw nothing. Searching for single days, I see exactly two days between 23 March and 28 April. But I'm still willing to bet that those days will magically open up once the high season rules go into effect and they can officially charge more.
You don't seem familiar with Japan's peak travel periods. If the hotel was just blocking award space, you'd be able to book the standard Deluxe room through Prince directly which is a 100% independent booking system from what they use for Marriott, and uses different inventory with certain rooms sometimes only being available through one platform or the other (corner rooms are often not available on Marriott when they are on Prince). Heck, under Marriott's nonsense "no blackout" rules, they could still put that room up for cash on the Marriott site and just not make awards available. Why would they stop selling those rooms entirely during peak travel time if they just wanted to stop award bookings? It makes zero sense.
I have two one-week bookings during the time where there are no more Deluxe rooms available. As I said, many other people on this forum do as well. Not only is it a peak travel time in Japan with sakura season, golden week, etc, but this was a well-known property moving from OC8 to NC6 so there's the added load of people redeeming travel packages before the merger. I can tell you that during the week where I have those two rooms, five of the Marriott/SPG properties in Tokyo have no base rooms left. The same goes for properties in Kyoto, RC Kyoto is super full from late March until early May.