tvetter01

Yeah, it would. I'm guessing that's not going to happen.

VA1379

One noticeable drop in the DC area:

Westfields Marriott Washington Dulles went from a category 4 to 3.

swag

Renaissance London Heathrow Hotel has dropped from 5 to 4.

Downtown New Orleans hotels all seem to be unchanged.

hhoope01

Since it looks like Marriott isn't going to publish a list of all the hotel category changes they have made for this year, I thought it might be helpful for us to make one for ourselves.

Marriott Concierge has published all hotel category changes for Cat. 6-8 hotels and those can be found in the http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/marri...y-changes.html thread.

Please post any Cat. 1-5 hotel category changes (either up or down) that you come across and I will update the list below.

Thanks.


Hotels Moving Down a Category Level

Current Cat 5 moving to Cat 4
Renaissance London Heathrow
Ren Club Sport Walnut Creek

Current Cat 4 moving to Cat 3
Oakland Marriott City Center
Westfields Marriott Washington Dulles
Kansas City Overland Park Marriott
Kansas City Airport Marriott

Current Cat 3 moving to Cat 2
Courtyard KC East/Blue Springs
Springhill Suites Overland Park

Hotels Moving up a Category Level

Current Cat 2 moving to Cat 3
Courtyard Tysons Corner Fairfax
Fairfield Lee's Summit (Kansas City area)
Springhill Suites Lawrence (Kansas City area)

Current Cat 3 moving to Cat 4
Courtyard Denver Downtown
Kansas City Downtown Marriott

Current Cat 4 moving to Cat 5
Cairo Marriott Hotel & Omar Khayyam Casino

dave-b

Moved Up from Cat 2 -> Cat 3
Courtyard Tysons Corner Fairfax

goldenbear

Moving Up:

Courtyard Denver Downtown: 3 -> 4
Courtyard Jersey Newport: 3 -> 4

Moving Down:
Oakland Marriott City Center: 4 -> 3
Ren Club Sport Walnut Creek: 5 -> 4

Twickenham

Moving Up:

Cairo Marriott Hotel & Omar Khayyam Casino Cat.4 -> Cat.5

pinniped

Surprised Westfields is moving down: that's actually a very good Marriott. I know room rates and demand factor into these things and that particular Marriott relies a lot on big corporate event business: perhaps the general scaling back of those types of events in 2008-2009 had an impact.

Not surprised about Cairo. It was an excellent value as a 4 and still a fair value as a 5.

satori

Loyalty traveler blog will publish a complete list of changes, probably over the weekend. I am about 60% through the spreadsheet now and working on category 3 which is the largest hotel category.

TrojanHorse

what a joke

anything above 1 is a reason not to stay at this place

SkiAdcock

I PM'd MarriottConcierge and asked them specifically to post a list. It shouldn't be up to travelers to try & figure it out. Cheers.

hhoope01

I definitely don't disagree, but we have asked about a list being provided since the change was first posted. So while I would love for Marriott to provide one, I'm not going to hold my breath for it.

VickiSoCal

I'm confused about why people need/want a list. If I'm looking to travel somewhere I look at what hotels are available and how many points they will cost me now. I don't care what they were last year. Am I missing something here?

keeton

Stop making sense!

This is Flyertalk, where we micromange our frequent traveler programs. We will pi$$ and moan about every change in the system. We will take take trips to places we don't care about because they "were a good use of points because we got .0231234221232 cents per point." Etc. etc.

Your reality check was well placed.

hhoope01

I can't speak for anyone else, but I have a few reasons.

1. I do have travel plans over the next 12 months that I have already planned out. A downward change in a hotel might be enough to make me rethink where I am using my points. (Yeah, every Marriott rewards member could go back and re-check every trip they have coming up over the next year or so to see if any of the hotels in the areas they are staying at dropped, but why not go to a single list of hotels rather than recheck each area hotel individually?)

2. If someone already has an award reservation and the hotel drops, they might be able to get some points back. (Yeah, I know someone posted that their reservation as automatically updated with points being redeposited, but personally I like checking every reservation personally just to make sure there aren't any "accidents".) But I guess everyone could also check each and every award reservation to see if any hotel they already have a reservation for has changed categories. Or if there were a nice listing of all the changes, those persons could check all their hotels at once rather than individually on Marriott's website.

3. I may have a Cat. 1-4 hotel cert to use. A Cat 4 to 5 raise would drop a possible location of my list of vacation spots. A drop from Cat. 5 to 4 might give me another possible location to look at. I guess after the category change I could again look at every possible vacation spot I thought about to see if a hotel is now useable by my cert. Or I could just look at the list of all changes to see what has changed.

4. Personally, I am wondering why Marriott didn't publish this list. They would have had to have it to make all the needed changes, but for some reason they didn't want any of their customers to see what hotels were going to change categories before the changes were made. I'd like to see just how many hotels (and which ones) changed up or down categories.

5. By being able to see exactly which hotels were raised and which dropped a category, we might be able to see some area trends. (i.e. if every hotel in an area rose by a category but one, why not that one hotel?) Due to this, I might change where I might have made an award reservation.

6. The list would have been of more value if we had it BEFORE the category changes as someone could have locked in a lower category level for a hotel they were thinking about. But this leads me right back to #4 and we may have at least one of the reasons Marriott didn't want anyone to know what these changes were going to be.