Originally Posted by
Ken C
Anyone have a good handle on the internal process Marriott has to clear SNAs. Interested in if there is preferential treatment to elite status or time of booking. I thought Hilton recently published something to this effect for suite upgrades, wasn’t sure about Marriott. Does Lifetime Platinum/Titanium trump Ambassador?
Have res for both the Disney Swan Reserve and JW Bonnet Creek with SNA requested not sure which has a better chance to clear and which to cancel.
Sorry to be the bringer of bad news but Marriott's never made any statement about the SNA prioritisation process and if you read through this entire thread (don't) then you'd realise that it appears to be somewhat random whichever criteria you try to fix and apply to make sense of it. You may hear anecdotes of replicable strategies that have proved successful but nobody could ever be certain which of the many variables were at play. SNA success depends on the brand accepting them, the individual hotel accepting them, the individual hotel making suitable upgrade rooms available for selection, the time of year/day of the week (ie. the volume of elites trying to apply them at peak times), the duration of your reservation (the shorter the better), and the X factor which is entirely unpredictable. Whether your elite status, the date you apply the SNAs, or which upgrade you choose from the available list makes a material difference to the success is entirely opaque.
In general, you can say that you will have a greater chance of successfully redeeming SNAs when they are offered online to a short reservation (1 or 2 nights) at an unpopular hotel in low season. Apply these criteria to your two reservations and see which looks the most likely.