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The Q2 2018 promotions for SPG and Marriott have been announced and are now open for registration.
Marriott MegaBonus
- Earn 750 points per night on every stay, starting with your third night.
- Registration required – direct link to register.
- Register by June 30, 2018 for stays from April 16, 2018 to July 20, 2018.
- Limit 36,000 Marriott Rewards bonus points.
SPG More Nights, More Starpoints
- Earn 250 points per night on every stay, starting with your third night.
- Registration required – direct link to register.
- Register by June 30, 2018 for stays from April 16, 2018 to July 20, 2018.
- Limit 12,000 bonus Starpoints
- Not all SPG properties are taking part in this promotion – here’s a full list of participating hotels.
Quick Thoughts
Seeing as Starpoints transfer to Marriott at a 1:3 ratio, these promotions are, in effect, identical.
Whether or not you see these promotions as valuable will depend on the nature of your upcoming stays. The Q1 promotions for Marriott and SPG offered more bonus points, but only on your second stay. That type of deal works out especially well if you only have short stays booked at their properties or if you’re willing to hotel-hop each night.
Those type of stays are terrible for these Q2 promotions though. That’s because a series of one or two night stays will earn zero bonus points as the bonus points are only awarded from the third night onwards.
For me personally though, I prefer the Q2 style of promotion as we tend to stay in hotels for 5-6 days at a time. Let’s say we had two stays – one for five nights and one for six nights – booked during both the Q1 and Q2 promotion periods and they both included a weekend night.
With the Q1 promotion, if we stayed at Marriott properties we’d have earned 3,000 Marriott Rewards bonus points. If staying at SPG properties, we’d have earned double points on our second stay, plus 500 bonus Starpoints for the weekend night. Our total points with SPG would vary depending on our room rate, but based on how much we look to spend on hotel nights, our total bonus Starpoints would be unlikely to exceed 1,500.
Compare that to this new Q2 promotion. With a five night stay and a six night stay, we’d earn 5,250 6,750 Marriott Rewards bonus points for Marriott stays. With SPG, we’d earn 1,750 2,250 bonus Starpoints.
As this shows, the Q2 promotion is better for longer stays, but worthless if you’ll only be staying one or two nights. I can see why they’ve set it up this way as it encourages members to book longer stays. However, I doubt it’ll engender much loyalty from travelers that only need to one or two night stays.
Even if you don’t think that you’ll benefit from these promotions, it’s still worth taking a couple of minutes now to register for them in case your travel plans change, plus registration closes before the end of the promotion period.
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[…] Register Now: SPG & Marriott Q2 2018 Promotions (Expires 7/20/18) […]
The marriott link says there are no promotions. ?
Maybe try opening the link in incognito mode, then click on ‘Already a member sing in’.
“Get 750 bonus points on every night of every stay, up to 36,000 points – starting with your third night.”
Why are you posting that stays of 2 nights don’t earn any points? After a total of 2 nights, it’s clear that every night after that earns 750 points, no matter how your stays are configured.
Thanks for highlighting that. I’d initially read the terms as meaning that you’d only earn bonus points from the third night of every stay. Having reread the terms, I can see that you’re right in that it means you’d earn bonus points after your first two nights of the promotion period rather than the first two nights of every stay. I’ve updated the post to reflect that.