Can anyone explain the "From X USD / Night?" on Marriott website?
 

This is a bit of a rant. For several years I have gone to New York City over Labor Day weekend. I generally book something pretty early that I can cancel and then keep looking once in a while to see if things get cheaper later, which they usually do. I assume their algorithms look at demand and adjust rates periodically.

You are all probably familiar with the interface; when I put in New York City and the dates I get a list of hotels there. Each one says "From (some number) USD / Night," and below is a box to click that says "View Rates." The annoying thing is that right now many of them say "from" some number, several are less than or just over $200 per night, but when you click on "View Rates" the rates are often well above that, many over $350. In some cases the rates change during the period I enter (4 nights), sometimes going up and sometimes down, but I never seem to see the "from" rate. It's annoying to have to click on "View Rates" for almost every hotel trying to find the actual price for the stay in question.

So my question is whether there is any reason that Marriott puts the $200 figure, when there is nothing close to that rate for the dates in question. Are just trying to get me to click on the rates for those hotels? Does it mean that the rate is less than $200 on some date that I don't care about? What is the point of that? I've told them the dates I want.

It would be much more useful if they would just tell me the total cost of each hotel for the stay I'm asking about. Any suggestions on how I can make this easier? Thanks.

No, but I share your frustration. I haven't had it work as badly as it seems to for you, however. Usually that "from" rate is available for one night of my stay, usually at a non-refundable advance purchase rate.

This is a huge pain in cities with many Marriott choices because I pretty much have to go through them all, one by one, checking the ACTUAL rates to see where the best value lies.

I like how IHG does blended cost per night vs. Marriott which shows lowest rate then has the little * to show the rate changes.

^+1

IHG website is so inferior to Marriott in so many ways, but that is one area where it is better.

Lowest rate for what? Any date at the hotel over the next year? Part of my frustration is that for most of the New York hotels the "from" rate never shows up for the dates that I have entered.

From previous investigations, the lowest rate is within the dates you are searching, but it's probably buried in some rate type, number of guests, room type, bed type, etc., that you don't have selected. It may require some sleuthing to figure out where it is hiding.

Yes, it could be much better, and it's a long-lived problem.

I had a long and very frustrating e-mail conversation about this problem with MR customer service but when they after about ten e-mails still didn't understand what I wanted and kept on copypasting their "answers" to something else entirely I finally gave up.

In my final answer I tried to clarify by giving IHG as an example how I would like to see rates and the answer I got was "what is IHG?" and "Our site is designed for busy executives who take the rate they get" or something similar.

IHG rate view is excellent and while I prefer Marriott loyalty program, I still book at IHG if I'm in a hurry. There you see directly the average nightly rate for your whole stay instead of needing to click on every property and then further until you finally see what it really is going to cost you. This is particularly frustrating in cities with a lot of properties and rates that fluctuate a lot during your stay.