The current Marriott promo is stay-based. Since I tend to stay in the same place for a week at a time, the bonus points have been dribbling in slowly. In fact, there weren't enough weeks in the promotion period to get all the stays in, so: hotel-hopping!

I looked up several candidate properties, and I was busily checking each of them for availability at the various discount rates: government, senior discount, AAA, etc. It got to be a little tedious.

When I was checking out award availability at various properties, I used the "Flexible Dates" feature in order to check out availability for up to 4 weeks at a time, and the little calendar would show you when standard awards (for instance) were available.

So, I tried it with my current rate-shopping exercise. It works! Not only does it show the available dates, it also shows the rate for each day that the rate is available. In many cases, this rate changes. Cool!

I can now arrange my hotel hopping to get the best rate, rather than guess and hope something came up.

Thanks for the heads up on this BigLar-I just was hunting for promo rates and had to manually enter some different dates-this will help with that.

How do you get to the flexible dates? I'm not seeing it on the Marriott website?

I'm a little confused as to how this works as well. Is it possible to give us a quick step by step on this. Thanks.

OK, here we go:

1. Pick a city, say Minneapolis. Do a "find and reserve". A list of properties should come up.

2. Pick a property and a date, and select AAA or Government or Senior rate, or enter a rate code.

3. You'll either get a room or not, but at the bottom it will say something like "Didn't find what you need? Use our flexible date finder". So, you click on that.

4. That will take you to a menu where you pick a start date and an interval; I usually use 4 weeks.

5. When you enter that, you usually have a chance to select a room type. Once you do that, the little calendar comes up showing you when (or if) the rate is available during that 4-week period.

You'll find that many rates are only available on weekends, or that the rate changes during the week, and so on. From this point, it's a simple matter to "back" up and select different start dates. You can lay out when (or if) a particular rate is available for the whole year, if you want.

Good luck.

Thanks BigLar, looks like a very useful little feature that I hadn't been putting to use. ^

Ok, when I try this, it comes up with:



Didn't find what you were looking for?

View alternate locations >>



I followed the instructions exactly. What gives?

I dunno; when I go through it, it works.

First, you must initially select a date, otherwise it won't process the request for a special rate.

Then if the rate is available, it gives you the rate. Down below, you will see a box that says:
So you click on that. It will take you back to where you select a start date and time interval. Then you select the type of room (there may be rate differences depending on whether you want Queen, King, etc. Click on what you want and you get the calendar.

This is an extremely useful tip. I had to IM someone today to find the link and decided to bump the thread for the benefit of others.

thanks for the info...really really useful when planning a trip and wanting to use MR points...