Soft landing?
 

So I had 105 nights in 2008, and 5 nights in 2009. do i go to zero status next year? or does marriott do any soft landing? for what it's worth, i should have about 10 nights in jan and another 5 in feb and 10 in march. it's been so long since i wasn't a hotel elite. i dont' know what i'll do!

I'll be interested to see the outcome of this as I'm in a very similar situation as OP...

Come On Soft-Landing!

Marriott has been known to drop their members only one level down/year (for maintaining your status, MR does not offer a rolling 12 month qualification period).

For 2009, a Buy Back Your Marriott Rewards Elite Status option was offered for 40/25/7.5K MR points (Platinum/Gold/Silver).

This was valid until 3/31/2009 :confused: If there was such an offer now, I may consider to maintain my gold status

Common sense have it that Buy Back status offers for 2010 will not be offered within qualification period!

^^

But in January I think there is a good chance we'll get the Buy Back offer again. :)

Soft landing
 

in 2007, I stayed only a few nights ~10, and got 10 credit card nights, but wasn't dropped from Platinum (I'd been Plat for 3 years before that). You have a good chance of getting at least Gold for a year, particularly if you had activity more than one year previously. Worst case, you can probably challenge back up if you don't get a soft landing.

What is a "challenge" ?

A challenge occurs where you are set a minimum number of nights to acheive in a short space of time to be bumped up, typically 12 nights in 3 months for Gold, 18 nights for Plat. You need to call the Marriott Rewards line to set it up for you.

I was offered the 18-night challenge late October to retain Platinum without calling, am nowhere close to hitting it.

Marriott has this year set challenges to members automatically to retain their status where they're nowhere near making it on their ytd figures. You can still request a challenge if not given one...

Marriott uses a non-published 'last-chance' standard to help MR members retain some status when their stay activity falls off a cliff (like mine did in 2003). Marriott will average your stay activity over the three previous calendar years and use that number to determine your holdover status. In a lot of cases, that results in a more-or-less soft landing. In my case, I had a horrendously large number of nights in 2002, so I retained some (otherwise unearned) status for three years even though I wasn't on the road any longer.

The MR elite desk clued me in to this when I called up in 2004 to thank them for keeping non-stayer me in the elite family. :)