Do note that the St. Kitts Beach Resort is an MVCI property, not a hotel. The hotel shows lots of award availability. The MVCI will only have award availability if owners offer their weeks back to Marriott for points (which for most any Caribbean location will probably not be a good use of that owner's week.) So outside of Orlando, most MVCI locations will usually not have very much to no award availability. MVCI properties have usually required a lot of time, flexibility and luck to get one for awards.

With that said, I was able to snag one at St. Kitts a couple of years ago. So they do turn up, but it isn't unusual to see very little to no awards available for them.

I'm only relaying what the lurker wrote here. I agree that things would be a lot simpler if they did allow us to upgrade legacy certificates, given that we won't know which category we'll need until after the deadline to redeem.

Not all properties going up in category are blocked. I booked Grovesnor House, London which is moving from an old Cat 9 to a new Cat 7. Could also have booked any of the London properties that were going up in category except Grand Residence. It and all other vacation club properties appear to be blacked out for redemptions.

During this one month lock-down period, most of the sought-after properties, or the aspirational properties will be gone. We can't change or attach, de-ttach the TPs.

But if you get a lot of free MR points left, there is still a lot of value, particularly the Cat-8 Ritz Carlton properties, like RC Hong Kong, RC St. Thomas etc....

No one knows if you'll get refunded after Aug 18th for travel packages, since the cost of the packages are going up and any changes may be under the new system.

If you like the Wailea area, and you are planning to buy a Cat 8 cert, why not book at the Wailea Beach Marriott? It's very nice (way nicer than the Residence Inn, IMHO), and it's moving form Cat 8 (40,000 pts/night) to Cat 6 (50,000 pts/night). Because of the recent remodel, the room rates are currently $500-1000/night into next year, so it's a good value for your points too.

Called in to book a package and was told by the rep that a name mismatch between the Marriott account and frequent flyer account (United in this case) was fine. Is that true? I assumed the names had to match.

Called yesterday to book a package for AS miles. Anyone know the transfer time for the miles to show? Rep said 2 weeks...is that accurate?

In normal times I'd bet on 8 days.

Now, no clue.

This might be the only thing in this whole merger that comes across as "unfair" to me. Marriott is essentially asking you to GUESS what your cert will convert to if you want to use it at an spg property or a property that is going down in value. Luckily in my case the only plans I have are for a hotel that is dropping from cat 6 to cat 4, so I feel very confident that my unattached cat 1-5 will work for my stay. For anyone else going for higher tier properties though this sucks.

It's worse than that--when I bought my TP I was explicitly told by the CSR--without any prompting--that I could adjust the level as I needed during the validity of the certificate.

Many pages ago someone was told the same as you are told, so she redeemed from her husband's account to her own UA account. The eventual outcome? the transfer was NOT going thru, rejected by UA with the apparent reason. She had to redo the whole thing.
If you want to read the actual posts, it would be over a week or even more ago that was reported. (several posts from the initial attempt to the eventual re-do.)

Good luck if you still want to try with mismatched names.

You can make an award reservation at the new rates as of August 18. And then call and attach the travel certificate to the reservation after Sept. 18. Marriott does not deduct the points for a reward reservation until you ask them to. So the one month period should have no impact on access to award inventory for travel packages.

Normal time without expedittion, AS miles are processed on Friday after the cut off time which is an unknown to us - then the info is sent to AS. AS will post them on Tuesday night. Miles show up in your account Wed morning.

Now, no way to tell.

Amazingly I just called the normal Travel Package number (3:45 EST) and was able to order 132K United and Cat 1-5 in less than 9 minutes from dial to hangup !
BEFORE the CSR answered, asked for MR# , my zip code, last 4 numbers on CC ; which I haven't had to do before.
The CSR also said without prompting that the category could be changed...... Not what Lurker has advised today.... so CSR have not been advised yet

100% agree. Without the information on how the existing certs would be converted, Members have no option but to guess. Personally I feel this no upgrade / downgrade treatment is the most unfair handling from Marriott.

Ditto.