Unless there has been some major refurbishment in the rooms at the Castle Hotel Windsor - MGallery during the past year this hotels exclusion is not a great loss.

Perhaps one should make another thread with a list that contains confirmed mappings for various properties.

I might call up Accor to inquire about a property or three, but it seems inconvenient to inquire about dozens of properties. Accor isn't quite at the forefront of digitization when it comes to SNUs.

Shame really I was considering to use my suite nights at the Novotel Surfers Paradise but these limitations shot that in the foot. Maybe I will go back to using them for the Fairmont in Shanghai or etc.

Dear members,

You have a lot of questions about the Suite Night Upgrades and we would like to share some additional information with you.

First of all, some of you compared the former Fairmont’s President Club Certificates and the new Suite Night Upgrade.

Actually, the Suite Night Upgrades have been designed in a different way as the former FPC Certificates. They must be used at the moment of booking the stay.

For the moment, you can redeem them by booking with our Reservation Offices and next year, for even more flexibility, you will also be able to redeem them while booking online on all.accor.com

We understand that, during this transition period, you may wish to apply them on an existing booking; in this case, your current booking has to be cancelled to be rebooked again using the Suite Night Upgrade. Our Reservation Offices teams will do their utmost to do it anytime it can be possible.

In any case, please remind that your Suite Night Upgrades are valid until the 31st of December 2020, which leaves time to plan other trips to use them.

Thank you Gilbertaue, for answering the questions about the correspondence between Rooms and Suites and about rates correspondence.

I just wish to add that the Suite Night Upgrade cannot be used or combined with Ovation Rewards certificates, nor for bookings made with Visa Ihr or Amex Fhr.

You also had questions about the way we granted the Suite Night Upgrade this year.

With the launch of ALL this year, all Platinum members without exception were granted some Suite Night Upgrades regardless of their annual activity, in recognition of their current status.

The members who won’t qualify to maintain their Platinum status in 2020 will nonetheless still be able to use their Suite Night Upgrade until the end of their validity period. But, on the other hand, the Suite Night Upgrade will not enable a Gold member to enjoy any other exclusive benefits of the Platinum status, such as the free lounge access for instance (except if this benefit is included in the rate booked).

Next year, the members of ALL will receive new Suite Night upgrades, when reaching 14 000 Status points or 60 Nights and after for each new additional level of 4000 Status points achieved.
The Suite Night Upgrades granted in 2020 will be valid until the end of 2021.

Regarding the exceptions applying, we understand your disappointment. Please kindly have in mind that this offer is still under deployment and in progress for some hotels and some countries.

The list of exceptions will be updated regularly to reflect this evolution and integrate new participating venues.

Thank you for your feedbacks and please continue sharing your remarks.

With my best regards,
Amy

Thank you for the update! ^ Your participation here is much appreciated!

This is not directed at you, but may I point out how utterly ridiculous the implementation and the rules associated with the SNUs are?

(1) To think that members will make an effort to spend 5600Euros / $8000CAD to earn two SNUs valid for a single night each shows how uncompetitive the ALL program is. Instead of offering a semi-competitive benefit (e.g. 2-3 certs valid for 3-5 nights each) Accor once again decided to offer as little as possible.

(2) Accor has been working on this for over a year and has come up with what must be the absolutely worst confirmed upgrade benefit in the industry in terms of design, IT implementation, complexity, exclusions, rules etc. Honestly, even sending out paper upgrade vouchers and being able to apply them to existing bookings would be a huge improvement over the current design.

(3) The requirement that the SNUs can only be used when making a new booking via Accor (or needing to rebook existing bookings during the transition) is just ridiculous. Additionally, there have been various reports that the SNUs cannot be used with various discounted rates (AAA, pre-paid, promotional etc.) and can only be used with the BAR rate. As a result, using a SNU oftentimes results in a higher rate than just outright booking a suite. Not sure whether this is actually a rule or just a matter of poorly trained agents, but if this is true, this hugely decreases the usefullness of the SNUs.

(4) The exclusion of Amex FHR / Virtuoso / Travel Leaders Select / other consortia programs is equally ridiculous and shows just how little Accor understands the luxury hotel market given that a very high percentage of bookings are made via those booking channels.

(5) The exclusion of entire countries - including France (!) - is rather irritating as well.

It's really unfortunate that Accor once again missed the opportunity to come up with some semi-competitive benefits and instead came up with a benefit that many here consider mediocre.

And if I may add: I can only assume that Accor has zero interest in offering a rewarding loyalty program with useful benefits since implementing a useful benefit wouldn't be rocket science:

- do some competive benchmarking
- offer a semi-competitive benefit such as two suite upgrades valid for 3-5 nights for Platinum members and a few more for Diamond members / when crossing certain thresholds
- if the IT department is too inept to implement this, send out paper upgrade vouchers
- allow upgrade certs to be applied to any existing booking booked under a qualifying rate (same rule as for stay/points earning)

Don't beat about the bush mate lol, but it is an awesome response and one which should be taken note of !

i agree total
Accor start a ALL program with a lot of trumpets
one year time to develop and now its still under development
A very bad start !
It was mentioned before many times
LISSEN to your clients the are the most important persons and if you lissen do something !
greetings cornelis

All valid concerns, and I agree 100%.

But I think the biggest issue of all, is the fact that you can't really use these on any rates other than basically full BAR. Accor could fix all of their stupid IT issues, and make them available at all properties, and make them more competitive by making the SNUs good for 5 nights each, but if I can't use them on any available rate, they are still useless. If I can find a half-dozen rates, bookable straight off the website at Fairmont.com which all allow me to book the suite outright cheaper than booking the BAR and applying a SNU, then it's a useless benefit. It should be applicable for a straight-up upgrade, off of whatever other rate you have available.

Fix that first. Then Accor should turn their attention to the other multitude of glaring abject failures.

And not to forget that we are ALL Diamond now !

According to the Accor website when I checked my status.

Loyaltylobby posts that if you combine the excluded brands with the excluded countries, you basically exclude between 80 and 90 per cent of Accor's portfolio. So that leaves like 10-20% of properties where you could, in principle, use a SNU.

But we know that in order to apply a SNU, you need to pay the BAR. And even if you pay the BAR, you may just get an upgrade to a junior suite. Consequently, as previous posters suggested, it will often be more attractive to book a suite outright during a private sale or whatever.

And the final straw is that an SNU is good for one night only.


So, what's my take?

Well, looking at it rationally, the SNUs are a good thing. They provide additional options for Plats and above. (Those of you familiar with option-pricing theory know that an option must always have a non-negative value.) Even if the value is limited due to the above, many smart FT-ers will find some use for these SNU.

Looking at it emotionally, Accor failed miserably. Their communication built suspense. They told top-tier elites BIG changes were coming. And what did we get? Some SNUs which are of very limited use. Clearly, some people are disappointed in a big way.

It is just so poorly implemented when they could have just modified the Fairmont system (give me only 1 suite cert as Plat and more to the Diamonds, no probs) where the certs were for up to 5 nights and applicable on most rates except deep discount ("Great Rates Great Dates" or similar). That would have worked for me, even with the limited availability. It is the implementation that is awful once again.

I still have a lot of stays in 2020, most probably my last as a plat. Will see how this evolves, if at all, over the year.

Absolutely wrong - SNU applies to any offer loaded on both the room and mapped suite not only the BAR.

Then you might want to inform Accor of that, because I'm getting very different results from Accor when I call, and others are reporting the same. I've hung up and called back with about 5 different agents, and every one of them said they only had access to the Daily Rate when redeeming a SNU. I gave them dozens of different rate codes to use, all of which are available to the public right on the Fairmont website, and none were usable by Accor central booking. So far, I've not found a use for an SNU that I couldn't book cheaper without it. And I'm not talking about special negotiated corporate rates (which, also shouldn't be excluded), or bookings through some shoddy OTA booking site, but rates that come up in normal results on a generic search on Fairmont.com. Every one of those rates should be available, along with TA rates like Amex FHR or Travel Leaders, which Accor central reservations wouldn't even have access to without an upgrade.

Accor has designed the most inflexible system I could possibly imagine. Whether they did it out of malice or sheer incompetence, both of which are equally probable, I'm not sure. It might be a bit of both.

The same offer needs to be available for the room to Index. If you get a special prepaid deal for a basic room and the indexed suite does not have the same special prepaid rate, you will need to pay the lowest rate type the suite has on offer indexed back to the basic room.

Accor IMO had a real opportunity to introduce a program that would correct most, if not all, of the flaws of Le Club Accor, get travelers excited about it, and drive business to its properties. Instead, we got this barely workable rubbish and what surely must be the Motel 6 of hotel loyalty programs.