MR plat absolutely do not have any kind of override on award stays. As a platinum of several years' standing, I tried to book 3 nights award six months out. There was no availability on those particular days, so I called the platinum service line. Sorry, nothing they could do. Not even a courtesy booking to let me know if it opens up some time in the future. Basically, they told me to keep checking and see if something becomes available.

By contrast, I wanted to book some award nights in Rome (same trip as above). There was no availability for all the nights I wanted, so the DD booked the nights for me, and told me to call back when I get the cert numbers and they'll take it from there.

Now, this sort of thing may or may not be extended to Golds, but it's stuff like that that keeps me going out of my way to maintain my Diamond status.

GUWonder: regarding dropping down-market -- I have done that because of the scarcity of properties in my immediate work area, and I stumbled onto the Choice hotel program (Sleep Inn, Quality Inn, etc.). The properties themselves compete fairly well with, say, Fairfield Inn, but their advantages (to me) are:

1. Easy to gather up points -- promos all the time.
2. No blackouts or capacity controls at all.
3. For awards, they are affiliated with Preferred Hotels, which have some very nice properties overseas, and it's still no capacity controls, no blackouts.

Of course, this means I now have three hotel programs to shuffle around with, but that's what we do, right?