sammyindc

I wish they would let this apply for large convention. Going to a very large convention in Atlanta in December and literally all the hotels downtown are booked. I have platinum status with Marriott and SPG and Diamond with Hilton and still can't find any hotels in the city.

hhoope01

While Marriott may or may not be allowing hotels to "play games" with this benefit, unfortunately, there isn't much they can do for situations like large conventions/events. If a group/convention has a block on the whole hotel (which for large conventions/events isn't unusual) there isn't much Marriott can do. They would be opening themselves up for legal issues if they forced a hotel to give up some contractually obligated rooms.

You might think that maybe Marriott could force hotels to not contract out their whole inventory (i.e. hold back 10% or something.) But that would asking quite a bit from hotel owners. I suspect that convention hotels could potentially lose out on a lot of revenue that way. So I doubt that will happen either.

Personally, in terms of a "room guarantee" my experience has been that Marriott's is the best of all the major hotels. While it may not be perfect, I've had better luck find a room at "sold out" hotels with my Marriott Plat room guarantee than I did when I was a Diamond at Hilton or Plat with SPG. Note that I am NOT talking about award room availability. Marriott does limit those. The SPG "last base room" available is much, much better than Marriott's "we won't black out the date, but we also don't force hotels to offer anywhere close to 100% of base room availability for awards either and we allow hotels to greatly limit the number of award rooms for X number of nights each year" approach.

sammyindc

Totally understand and you make a good point. It can be quite annoying however when a large convention has a room block on the majority of hotels. They could impose a rule that in those situations 5 or 10% of rooms in a 10 mile radius for example should remain available.

CJKatl

If by "they" you mean the City of Atlanta, obviously nobody has thrown money towards City Hall to pay someone off to institute such a rule.

Mr. Vker

Another easy way to check for Plat override is to try and reserve two rooms during the search. Both work, but you don't have to logout and log back in. Adding the second room eliminates any plat override properties.

lockman21

Good information! Thanks. I was looking for Minneapolis on Feb. 3 haha. Might be out of luck.

sammyindc

No I meant Marriott.

SkiAdcock

Yeah, that would be a 'special event' since it's Super Bowl weekend in MSP

Cheers.

rasheed

I think one of the issues recently is with the more restrictive cancellation policy (2 or 3 days prior), the oversell percentage stat does change a bit.

I have come across a number of properties at Hilton that wouldn't Diamond Force. I have called each time and the Diamond Desk confirmed the oversell rate was over the threshold to allow further bookings. Like Marriott, I can book Diamond availability on the website (and as indicated by others, Diamond reward bookings can also be done, but with the destruction of the reward chart, this is not so valuable).

Thankfully, I have not had to use Marriott Platinum Reservation much (as the rate is not great), but I would not be surprised if Marriott now has more defined parameters on how much oversell they allow as a recent enhancement on the website. As a Plat, I see quite a bit of sold out situations on the website which used to never be the case.

Rasheed

NAJetSet

So I booked our annual holdiay vacation in February '17 for January '18, at our usual resort in hawaii (Waikoloa). The rate at the time, was the usual rate we've more or less been paying for the last decade or so each year, so didn't think anything of it. (although I was concerned last year as they just converted half the hotel to vacation club...)
I just logged in today to do some other bookings for unrelated business, but was looking at the waikoloa confirmation, and noticed it now says "Changes can not be made to Platinum Override Reservations, please call...". This wasn't a plat override origianlly, it wasn't even a 'special rate', just the market rate at the time. I did notice that the market rate now is about 6 times higher though.

Any thoughts why this is now an 'override' booking?, and are there any down sides? Also I'm Plat. Premier, and have been for years, but not sure if that makes any difference.

Jon Maiman

When you make a reservation, there isn't any indication/notification that it is a platinum override. So even though the rate was good when you made the reservation it could have been a platinum override at that point. Furthermore, when you go to change a reservation if the property is in a sell out condition at that time, I believe your reservation is considered to be a platinum override at that point. Bottom line, you have lost the flexibility to make changes to your reservation but other than that there aren't any other downsides.

--Jon

P.S. If you need to make changes, keep checking by trying to make a second reservation. Availability changes all of the time. You can also do reservations for individual nights and then have them combined later. Sometimes it is easier to get changes one night at a time as availability opens up.

ntamayo

I invoked Platinum Override over the phone recently to extend my upcoming stay over New Year's Eve. It was a different room type at their corporate rate (vs cash+points rate of my original reservation), but reaching out to the hotel, I'm now able to stay in my original room for the entire stay and enjoy fireworks over the lake. ^

Mr. Vker

Has anyone seen more and more properties unavailable-regardless of Plat Override? Just randomly-dates and locations-I have seen places unavailable that should offer the override. Seems more and more easy to obtain the exception and eliminate that benefit.

Jon Maiman

My statistically insignificant, empirical experience also suggests that exceptions are more easy to obtain. So while there haven't been any published changes to the rules that I am aware of, I do believe something has indeed changed.

--Jon

Mr. Vker

Most recently, I'm trying to get Feb 7-9 at JW Desert Ridge. Nothing Available. However, flexible dates shows available every day in Feb. Could be a website glitch? Will try calling. But I've seen it at JW Orlando, Gaylord Nashville and several others too.