I checked the cash rates before posting and the cheapest rate was a few dollars less per night today than it was when I booked a points reservation. During that same period, a 3-night award stay went from 150K to 210K. The hotel is a Ritz-Carlton in California.

This is exactly what I'm talking about. Going from offpeak to peak rate over night for the same period.

This is a bad omen that Marriott may not grant another extension beyond 8/1/2021. Some of the reward nights may have been removed since Marriott and hotels want cash, not those lousy points, FN and TPs....

Peak or off peak doesn’t matter with TPs. A cat 4 TP cert can be redeemed at a cat 4 hotel regardless of the number of points being charged. (Same does not apply to FNC, but this is the TP thread.) :)

I understood your point. Since I keep a travel spreadsheet, I knew what the cash rates were at the time of booking, which makes monitoring cash and award rate changes easy.

I have already used almost all of my family's Marriott certificates. So far, I have used one 25K, nine 35K, three 50K and one Cat 4 travel certificate. I would have been willing to spend $350 for the most of the rooms where I used a 35K certificate rooms and $500 for all of the rooms where I uses a 50K certificate.

I paid cash for a several nights at a Ritz-Carlton in Florida because I ran out of 50K awards.

Since this is the travel package thread, I probably shouldn't have responded to a post about peak rates here. Since there appears to be some commentary about TPs in the FN thread and the reverse, I thought a data point might be useful. In any case, if this is the only inappropriate comment that I make online over the next few days, I will have completed a much better than average week.

There's risk in everything... but the likely scenario is that pandemic will still be around in most parts of world three months from now in July and travel will still be restricted in most of the world.

I know really well that TPs are not affected by the peak vs offpeak. I just illustrate how Marriott manages the "pricing" in general.

True. And some people would say that folks got a lot of values from those TPs and they have been extended for a couple of years. Those are true too. But we still have face the reality now. Both us travelers and Marriott.

Yes, if Marriott would listen. So what "goodwill" Marriott gets if it announce another 4-month extension on 7/15/2021? Marriott likes to play the same game as we are facing now.

I guess we still remember that Marriott suspended the category change (peak too?) in APAC only in March 2020. But when US entered lockdown, Marriott did not do anything, but just changed pricing to offpeak.

I do agree, they like to play the same game! Any extension will come with little notice, albeit hopefully not as short as the end of July, I still have a few of these TP’s. In fact I have enough whereby the tentative late June reopening date for hotels in my country will almost physically not give me enough time to use them back to back locally if I wish to.

Not sure if this has been discussed before but here's the situation: I have a cat 1-4 legacy TP in my account. I'm trying to book a 7-night stay at a cat 7 hotel. I first made the reservation using points alone, then called customer service and asked them to apply the 1-4 TP so I can get some points back. I was told nope, cat 1-4 TP can only be redeemed at cat 1-4 properties. They can't "upgrade" it to a higher category TP by pulling points from my account, which was how it was done in the past when I redeemed these TPs for higher category hotels. I asked to speak with the supervisor and she repeated the same thing and said the only way to use my cat 1-4 TP is to book a cat 1-4 hotel. I told them I'd been able to use these certs in the past on higher category hotels by "upgrading" them. She said she wasn't aware of any way to do that.

Anyone has any advice on how I should handle this? Thanks!

this was minimally available when the conversion took place and only if you were able to get an agent to do it. I don’t think I’ve seen any reports of upgrades for awhile.

being able to upgrade freely to other categories was before the merger.

Ah, got it, thanks. It's been a while since I used one of these. Guess I'll have to settle for a cat 1-4 hotel future stay then, that is, if they're willing to extend it again!

Frequent Miler reports that they'll be extended to Jan 2022!
https://frequentmiler.com/good-news-...es-and-points/

Great news, pleased to see a little more notice also.

I forgot to add - the report indicates that both travel package weeks and free night certificates will be extended.

Confirmed by Bonvoy: