I was doing a search, and one of the results wasThis Thread which I had long forgotten, even though it was only 2 months ago.

To recap, this thread was discussing:

But what I found interesting was these posts:

The same day as the change, a discussion was started about 535 hotels headed up 1 cat level (and 14 down).

I find it ironic that I had never connected the events.

Did you???

I think that aaupgrade's words could be premonitory as well in what regards to the Travel Packages which now look to good to be true in this devaluation scenario. I also redeemed 2 packages this week to stay covered for a while.

No irony at all....stay tuned. I feel a disturbance in the force

I personally think there will be a change in packages next, along with much less standard award availability.

Happy to be wrong

Pat

What Big Devaluation? Did I miss something? Category Creep here only hits us for 8-9% per category (based on 083 vs. 087 vs. 091 awards) I saw a few of my favorites jump from Cat 6 to 7, but that's about it.

Nothing Starwoodlike that I can see. Unless they phase out the packages, of course... But Chris stated on another thread that big changes are not in the works. Personally, I think Marriott would be crazy to kill or change the packages: they are a key reason we're here and why many of us continue to speak highly of Marriott Rewards.

Without the 087 and 091 awards, I would be doing 60 nights a year at FS Hiltons. Dead serious. They are why I'm here.

Any more changes I am jumping ship to *wood

Good idea. Starwood has never had a devaluation of any kind. They'd never pull any shenigans like...I don't know...jacking up award rates at hundreds of hotels by 20-133% with no advance notice at all.

If you are referring to SPGs latest deval, while they didn't say which hotels would be affected, they did let everyone know that it was coming.

I think there are a couple of differences that have really caused issues with Marriott's more limited deval versus SPGs bigger one. First, Marriott gave no warning at all where SPG did. Second, Marriott gave the perception of playing games with us by waiting until after the Freddies voting where SPG did not.

Now with all that said, I'm not personally railing against Marriott because of this. I think it has been shown that Marriott traditionally changes its hotel categories around the beginning of every year and it shouldn't be a surprise to everyone here that they did it again this year and that most of the changes were an upward movement of hotels, that is normally what happens every year. Pinniped was correct in noting that Marriott's change effected far fewer hotels than SPGs and there was no new creation of award levels as there was for SPG. I personally see the change this year as a normal yearly update and that is why there was no prior notice. I will also agree that while SPG DID notify the public that the changes were coming, they WOULD not tell the public what hotels were going to be affected. In fact, if I remember posts correctly, they went so far as to tie Starwood_Lurker's hands in even talking about it which is something they had never done before.

Before that deval, I had started to make SPG my second choice of hotels behind Marriotts. Because of it, I've started looking at Hilton instead as a 2nd choice. Next year after another round of devals, I may change yet again, but I'll just have to wait and see.