pokee

I haven't had any Bonvoy hotel stays since the fall, so I am not sure of the recent status with regards to points and former IT glitches.

Can anyone confirm if you can do points advance reservations on all former SPG properties? I am looking to book either Aloft or Four Points by Sheraton, but don't have sufficient points. I am assuming I can, but wanted to see what people's experiences have been like (especially with the new 14-day points requirement for e-cert).

Also, if I order an e-cert on any Marriott or SPG property, and then decide to cancel online, how long does it take the points to be refunded into my account? I know there were issues with this after the system switched over last year and some people had to wait days (or weeks) for points refunds. Have they worked out all the glitches for points reservation cancellations?

And when acquiring enough points to order an e-cert after doing a points advance reservation, do you still have to order the e-cert manually, or will the system now auto-generate it for you once you've reached the points required in the reservation?

Happy

Yes you can make point advance booking on former SPG properties because now they are all on Marriott platform.

When you talk about e-Cert - do you mean the usual e-Cert from the point booking or the free night certs, as these certs are of different nature and the system seems not to handle the latter very well when the underlying booking is cancel.

For the regular point bookings, the e-certs that ordered and attached to the properties would be refunded almost instantly after you cancel the booking (that the cancellation meets the deadline of free cancellation!). Your account balance would reflect the refunded pts, your cancellation confirmation on the screen actually tells you how many points would be refunded to your account, although the account activities screen would take 24 hours to reflect that, but the account balance would increase to reflect the refund. I canceled a 5th night free booking at Four Points Perth last week, my account balance went up by 70K points before I received the cancellation email confirmation. If you do not see the points coming back just navigate a few screens of the site, then return to the screen where you can see your account balance, the balance should have gone up by then.

One more thing - avoid doing cancellation at late night or weekends when the system might go thru some maintenance or nightly update - then it would delay the point refund or God forbid, messes up the refund - therefore, avoid those problematic time frames whenever you need to do change or cancellation. This is not limited to Marriott, but also Hilton Honor and IHG.

If it is a FN cert, then you probably should call to have the rep detach the cert first, then cancel the reservation. There are cases the reservations are cancelled but the certs were not auto-released therefore they are "lost" but the reps can see the "lost" certs and put them back to the account. To avoid the hassle, it is better to call to cancel if it is a FN cert booking.

margarita girl

Happy

Thanks for the great DP. I have not read about this mechanism. Great find.

Basically swap the FN payment to a Point payment whether the system auto-deducts the points when you have enough in the bal or if not, it allows Point Advance booking. Once that is done and the FN cert safely showing up in the account, then cancel the reservation to get back the points.

kkl

Do I need the required points to redeem the certificate for them to 'credit' the difference? Thats what I been told today. Only managed to 'fix' 2/3 reservations as I did not have enough points inside my account to issue all certs

I tried 'modifying' a different reservation which has a certificate already issued to access the points and change it to points advance. but the points advance selection wasnt available

swag

Buried in today's updates about peak/off-peak, VftW shares this news about Points Advance.

TerryK

Thank you for posting. ^

Does that mean existing PA bookings must be redeemed by Sept 14th in order to keep original rate? Major change if that is the case.

swag

As I understand "for reservations made prior to September 14 they will honor up to 5 points advance bookings at the standard rate even if those reservations fall on a peak date", this means:

- If you have 5 or fewer, they will be honored.
- If you have 5 or more, you should attach certs to as many as you can, so at most 5 remain in "points advance" status.
- If you have more than 5 and not enough points to bring that total down to 5, we don't know how that will get resolved. Will Bonvoy pick 5 for you? Or will you be able to decide after the fact?

MrM2016

This is going to be such a mess with the call centers. It has already been a crap shoot to see if staff are adequately trained to understand honoring a points advance reservation where the rate has changed. Now they throw in 2 different types of advance reservations and an arbitrary limit for one type.

Get those certs locked down folks, this is a guaranteed cluster.

TerryK

How is this going to work with Marriott IT?

Even if agents try to enforce this manually, they may not be able to see all your reservations. I have continued issue of disappearing reservations from my account. Reservations are valid as I can pull them up using confirmation codes, they just don't show up on my account list.

lexdevil

The biggest advantage I can see is still having the points in your account to rebook should availability shift to standard or off peak from a higher priced redemption. This would allow you to rebook and then cancel the higher priced reservation once you know that you have the new one. If you don't have enough points in your account to book at the lower rate, you'll have to cancel the higher priced reservation and hope that the availability is still there at the lower rate once your points are refunded.

exploreaswego

DP: Just called the Titanium support line to apply 2 points advance reservation, after confirming the dates, I was put on a brief hold.
After 10-15 minutes, both reservations were confirmed. They were 1 night stays, so for each reservation, 85k were deducted from my account, followed by 25k credited back.
The 25k credit were posted immediately, so my points balance reflected the correct amount of deduction at time of redemption.
The agent was also able to see when I made the points advance reservation, she mentioned before March, so she knew the pre-category adjusted rates.

Super excited for our upcoming stays at the Griiti and StR! Venice, here we come

dtremit

But in that case (not having enough points in your account for the new reservation), you should be able to use Points Advance online for the new reservation, prior to cancelling the old one. Or am I missing something?

lexdevil

Not if it's too close to the date of the stay. Or if it takes you beyond the maximum number of PA reservations allowed (as we don't yet know how that will function). But other than that, yes.

Happy

In majority of the cases, a paid reward stay when canceled, the points immediately return to the account as reflected in the balance, for as bad as Marriott IT has been - the refund of points since late last year / early this year, has not had any glitch from own experiences as well as hardly any more negative DPs in this forum - so I think you can cancel the existing bookings and immediately rebook the lower cost one - because you would have seen there is availability with the lower cost to begin with - cancelling a higher cost booking should not reduce the availability, but add to it - in theory any way.