Starwood Lurker

Since last week when we announced the new free night Award Chart that will go live in August, many of you have been curious about which Categories hotels will fall into. Over the next few months we’ll be able to share this information for all hotels, however in the meantime you can now preview a sampling of hotels across five top redemption destinations. You’ll be pleased to see that our move to one, combined Award Chart offers even more value for your points, with more hotels moving down in redemption rates than up. This will also hold true as we place all hotels in our new Award Chart.

Compare redemption rates

Best regards,

William R. Sanders
Social Media Specialist
Starwood Hotels & Resorts LLC

[email protected]

ethernal

Wow - some of those that will be a higher category in 2019 are absolute steals. The St. Regis New York for only 60K a night when the dumpy Times Square Sheraton is 50K? Madness.

Will there be capacity controls for 2018 on the hotels that are going to the higher category in 2019?

pewpew

Interesting how some of the once good value SPG properties seem to have huge jumps, and it seems the FS SPG categories also tend to go up rather than down

AndySAV

If an existing SPG suite award reservation is available for less points when the new combined award chart is released, will customer service reprice the SPG award at the lower Marriott rate?

thomasito

No big suprises; but some changes look weird. Allmost all Hotels in Dubai will be Cat5. Who would book the 4Points as an ward, if the Grosvenor House has the same points requirement?

coolfish1103

You need to rebook it.

...so there is a chance it will not be there!

ethernal

In my experience this is typical of Marriott redemptions... you can get decent redemptions on higher end properties, but lower end properties are always overpriced. You end up paying 30K-40K points for a Courtyard in the middle of nowhere when the comparable Starwood property would have been 12K-21K points (4K-7K SPG). Not sure what the point of that is other than making people spend $ instead of points (or staying somewhere else entirely).

RafKa

Also, will these be bookable for 365 days in advance at Cat 7, or only for stays between Aug-Dec 2018?

theOtherHolmes

So you would have to rebook if you have an existing reservation for cat 7 at 30K SPG points per night, then it comes down to 20K SPG per night on Aug. 1.

This is going to be interesting.

Fizzer

I had read somewhere that you were not to cancel and try to rebook but that you should call customer service who would attach a certificate at the lower rate to the booking, so that you should get the points back. We'll see if that actually happens.

Kagehitokiri

al maha not listed for dubai, and no other villa resort destinations

adunker

Those St Regis rates O_o. Looks like I'm gonna plan a few trips to book in August.

SanDiego1K

William, big thanks for the early notification.

bgriff

I'll be curious to see what is happening with more Cat 5 hotels in particular. The NY and Paris charts suggest that a lot of current Cat 5s are going up to the 50K points level, which is quite a painful jump and devaluation. But those are also unusually expensive cities, and maybe some of those hotels were marginal being placed in SPG Cat 5 already. There are a lot of "nicest SPG hotel in town" places in cheaper cities like, say, the Nines in Portland. If those places also tend to jump up to 50K points, then the value for upper-mid-range properties is going to be pretty bad in general. What's happening in Mexico City looks more promising by contrast--the overpriced SPG Cat 6 St Regis is coming down to 50K while the appropriately priced Cat 5 W is remaining about the same, at 35K.

It's nice to see the Westins in NY coming down to 50K, which feels totally appropriate to me, but I had hoped perhaps more SPG Cat 6s would fall in price than seems to actually be the case. It will be interesting to see what happens with London, for example. To judge by NY I'd guess the Great Northern will fall to 50K and everything else will stay 60K or higher. Like NY that's not terribly attractive.

There will be some bargains at certain spots on the chart, but it feels like overall these new Marriott points are worth maybe like 0.6-0.7 cents each in general use, which is definitely less than Marriott points were often worth before. And even still some of the 60K points hotels are somewhat often available for less than $360-$420 per night.

This will even out somewhat for points earned on hotel stays thanks to the higher earning rate, but it's going to be nearly impossible to justify using an SPG/Marriott credit card for non-bonus spend.

Kagehitokiri

yeah, those are not current rates?