Marriott Bonvoy members who earn 50 elite nights in a calendar year earn Platinum Elite status and a Choice Benefit. Those most commonly chosen of the 50-night Choice Benefits are Nightly Upgrade Awards. Long-time Marriott Platinum members know that these awards can be a very mixed bag in terms of how they operate, but it is also worth knowing some quirks about upgrade awards, particularly that the upgrade options available to you might appear to vary from desktop to app.
What are Marriott Nightly Upgrade Awards, and how are they supposed to work?
For those unfamiliar, Marriott Nightly Upgrade Awards are a benefit that can be chosen after earning 50 elite nights in a calendar year.
Each Nightly Upgrade Award can be used to request an upgrade for one night to a more premium room or a suite. These used to be called “Suite Upgrade Awards”, but when they had become almost impossible to use for upgrades to suites, Marriott changed the name to Nightly Upgrade Awards and expanded the ability to apply them toward almost any room type, allowing you to choose to prioritize an upgraded view, bedding for an additional guest, etc.
The basic things you need to know about Nightly Upgrade Awards:
- You need one for each night of your stay. If you have a 4-night stay but only 3 Nightly Upgrade Awards, the system will not allow you to attach those upgrade awards to 3 nights — you’ll need to apply them on a booking with 3 or fewer nights.
- Unlike Hyatt, upgrades are not confirmed in advance. Instead, Marriott’s internal algorithms begin looking for a confirmable upgrade 5 days in advance for most brands (but 3 days in advance for select brands). Note that availability isn’t the only factor that determines whether an upgrade clears. In other words, the room you want might be available, but that doesn’t mean you will be upgraded to it. The algorithm decides. It will continue to “check” for your upgrade until 2pm on the day before arrival. If the upgrade does not clear, the Upgrade Awards are returned to your account.
- You request to apply your upgrade awards from within your reservation after making a booking.
- Nightly upgrade awards can be applied to paid or award stays
- Each nightly upgrade award can be applied to one night only (you can’t apply them to multiple reservations and wait to see what clears).
The basic gist of Nightly Upgrade Awards is that you make a booking, request an upgrade, and pick the type of room to which you would like to upgrade.
That last bullet point above can be a bit of a pain: last year, in January, I applied my nightly upgrade awards to a reservation in November. When they didn’t clear, I ended up with 5 Nightly Upgrade awards expiring the next month. In the end, I wasn’t able to use all of them, and 3 expired unused. Still, when they work, they can be great.
An example applying a Marriott Nightly Upgrade Award
The flow for applying Marriott Nightly Upgrade Awards is that you make a booking, then either immediately click a button on the confirmation page to begin an upgrade request, or you can later pull up the reservation details to request the upgrade.
As an example, I made a booking for a one-night stay at a Moxy hotel in New York City. At the bottom of the booking confirmation page, it gave me the option to upgrade the stay using a nightly upgrade award.
After clicking to start the upgrade request, I was presented with a number of room types. I could select which ones I would like to accept in exchange for my upgrade award(s). I simply needed to tick the box next to the room types that would meet my needs and then submit the request. For instance, in the screenshot below, perhaps I would be happy with the guest room that has 2 double beds, but not the guest room with 4 twin bunk beds; I could simply click the box next to the room with 2 double beds as my upgrade choice and leave the twin bunk room unselected. Note that you can select multiple types, and although you might think that Marriott would only upgrade you to the lowest room type you are willing to accept, in my experience, I have still occasionally been upgraded to the highest room type selected.
While a room with 2 queen beds might not sound like much of an upgrade, the system tends to offer all of the room types that are higher than whatever room type you booked (in this case, I booked a room with 1 full bed). I actually appreciate this aspect of Nightly Upgrade Awards because there are times when I simply want to be able to get a room that would accommodate more people or one with a specific view.
After you select your desired upgrades and continue, your request is recorded. The system begins looking for upgrades a few days before your stay. If an upgrade is confirmed, you’ll receive an email with the good news.
On the flip side, if the upgrade has not cleared, you’ll receive an email indicating that Marriott is still “working on” your upgrade.
You won’t receive either of those emails until 5 nights in advance of your stay (or 3 nights in advance at select brands).
Quirks of Marriott’s Nightly Upgrade Award system
Through ordinary experience, I’ve run into some quirks of the Marriott Nightly Upgrade Award system that are worth knowing.
For starters, some properties do not participate in the program. If you make a reservation at a property that does not accept upgrade awards, you may see a message like this (though it will say “Nightly Upgrade Awards” rather than Suite Night Awards — this is an old screenshot).
However, don’t rely on the Marriott site to be correct 100% of the time. I took the above screenshot on the confirmation page for a booking I made at a Residence Inn in suburban Rochester, NY. It didn’t seem possible to me that a suburban Residence Inn would be opted out of accepting upgrade awards. Sure enough, a few minutes after making the reservation, I went back to “Trips” in the Marriott app, pulled up the reservation details, and the button changed to say that I was eligible for an upgrade after all.
I haven’t run into that issue in a while, but it is worth knowing that the system can be quirky in this regard, so it is worth trying to make the request both on desktop and in the app and/or waiting a few minutes after making the reservation to try to make the upgrade request.
Speaking of desktop versus app, one of the most potentially confusing things about making upgrade requests is that the upgrade request page sometimes features different names for the upgraded room types.
For instance, I just made a reservation at that same suburban Rochester Residence Inn. This time, I was able to immediately request an upgrade. On the desktop site, these were the upgrade options I was presented:
However, in the app, the upgrade options were listed this way:
Interestingly, the room types shown above are actually the same, but they are named differently. When requesting the upgrade on desktop, it wasn’t immediately clear to me that the top option was a 2-bedroom suite and the second option was a 1-bedroom suite because the upgrade options only listed bedding rather than the room type names shown in the app. For a moment, I thought that the upgrade options were different in the app versus desktop. That can be confusing.
In fact, I ran into this issue during my recent trip to Bora Bora. I had a couple of nights booked at the Westin Bora Bora, and I wanted to apply my Nightly Upgrade Awards. I specifically wanted to upgrade to one of the two rooms shown here:
Unfortunately, the Royal Overwater was not an option using upgrade awards. The Premium Otemanu View 1 Bedroom Villa was an option, but that wasn’t immediately obvious to me.
When I went to request an upgrade on desktop, the upgrade options had slightly different room type names. Desktop showed the upgrade options like this:
However, those room type names do not match the names they use when selling the rooms for cash or award stays. In reality, the top upgrade option is the Premium Otemanu Overwater 1-bedroom villa shown in the cash rate search results above, but I was thrown off by the fact that the naming of the room type wasn’t identical to what was available for sale at cash rates.
I found the app much easier to understand because it used the same room type names as a paid search. In the app, I could see that the first upgrade option was the room type I wanted (the Premium Otemanu View 1 Bedroom Villa). In fact, the upgrade options shown in the app were the identical room type names as the first three shown above, but the app is using the same room type names used when looking at cash rates.
The short version of the story is this: use the app to request an upgrade when there are many room types, and you want a very specific type(s).
That Westin Bora Bora Premium Otemanu View upgrade did clear, and I think it was a top 5 upgrade that I’ve ever gotten at Marriott, perhaps only behind the villa we got at Domes of Elounda (which wasn’t using an upgrade award) and the Staircase Suite at the St Pancras Renaissance (which was an upgrade award that cleared).
That certainly is a premium view room. There are pluses and minuses to the hotel, but the view is a bolded plus.
Bottom Line
Marriott Nightly Upgrade awards can be useful, though the likelihood of upgrades clearing at popular properties is questionable. Still, it is worth knowing how they work and the differences you may find between desktop and app, lest you be confused about the room types to which you are trying to upgrade. Remember that you must choose your 2025 fifty-night Marriott Choice Benefits by February 1, 2026. If you do not choose, you’ll automatically receive 5 nightly upgrade awards.
Want to learn more about miles and points? Subscribe to email updates or check out our podcast on your favorite podcast platform.
Feel like these are the definition of a fake status benefit. At most they’re flipping a flag in Marriott’s automated upgrade system, and maybe it shows this flag to revenue management / moves you up the priority list in software. At the end of the day upgrades are still entirely discretionary, and at the status level required to earn these NUA, you are already eligible for discretionary updates from the hotel. In markets where status and the “rules” of the program are actually respected (Asia, mostly), they’ll probably get you somewhere. Everywhere else, it’s marginal at best. The less time spent thinking about these nearly useless NUAs, the better IMO.
Nick, you keep teasing us about the Westin Bora Bora. We need a review to compare to your experience at the St Regis Bora Bora! (Please :))
I’d like to hear about Nick’s experience as well. The Royal Overwater Villa was stunning – I’m glad we upgraded. It might be the best view in all of Bora Bora.
However, the service at the hotel was mediocre. I was celebrating my 40th and the hotel didn’t do anything to recognize this, even though they asked if I was celebrating something prior to check-in. I recognize everyone is celebrating something but they could have done something small.
I feel like a snob but at the St. Regis, the hotel went over the top with everything when we celebrated my partner’s birthday. I understand they are two different brands – the St. Regis is upscale and the Westin (at least in the states) isn’t.
Very strange algorithms ruling these nightly upgrade awards. I don’t use them a lot, but, by a slim margin, in the majority of cases, I have been turned down for suite upgrades using the NUA, but then given a suite upgrade at check in when trying to use them
I just earned the choice benefit for the first time. No experience with the upgrade awards. Not sure if I want to play the upgrade lottery (unclear how many opportunities I will have this year to submit for an upgrade that is actually semi meaningful) or if I should just choose the five extra qualifying nights to get a bit closer to lifetime status instead.
Take the ENCs instead.
That’s what i did. Got me right to 75 so titanium. United silver and the free night cert as a titanium are for me better than the 5 upgrade lottery
We stayed 5 nights at the Westin Bora Bora as a Marriott Platinum member. Unfortunately, my upgrade awards did not clear for any of the upgraded room types. They did sell us an upgrade to the Royal Overwater bungalow.
I tried once again using my nightly award upgrades at Tambo del Inka in Peru. Again, they did not clear.
All 5 of my award expired on 12/31.
Tip from a long-time Ambassador: For most, SNA/NUAs will expire unused. Even with Marriott’s algorithm handling upgrades now.