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Marriott sometimes offers “PointSavers” redemptions, which are awards that cost 20% fewer points than a “normal” award. That concept made sense when they had an award chart, but now that price can vary with the direction of the wind, you might have thought that they discontinued those awards (how would they figure out the price of a “normal” award?). Also, if you normally use the Marriott app to search for reservations (as I do), you might have thought that they discontinued those awards. In either case, you’d be wrong. The moral if the story is that if you’re exclusively a Marriott app user, you are probably missing opportunities for savings now and then.
I was running a hotel search in Las Vegas yesterday (looking to see if I could book Cosmopolitan via Marriott and earn Hyatt credit….Cosmo is now an MGM property). I ordinarily almost exclusively run hotel searches via each major chain’s respective app. I generally tend to do most things on my laptop rather on mobile, but hotel apps are a notable exception. Unfortunately, in Marriott’s case, that’s probably a mistake.
The first hotel result I saw in the app was for a hotel called The English Hotel (a Tribute Portfolio hotel that Stephen points out has a restaurant called The Pepper Club).
I wasn’t actually interested in that property, but I assumed that the nightly rate was 43,000 points…..ya know, ’cause that’s what the Marriott app said it would be.
Like I said, I was really looking for Cosmo, and it wasn’t showing up in the list on my phone. It was available via Amex Fine Hotels & Resorts. Because of that difference, I decided to go to Marriott.com on my laptop to search just to double confirm that Cosmo wasn’t available via Marriott.
The English was still the first result in the list, but it priced differently on desktop!
As you can see, the cost of the night was 34,400 Marriott Bonvoy points rather than 43,000 points! I still wasn’t looking for that hotel, but I thought it was very interesting to see it available as a PointSaver on the desktop site but not in the app.
Of course, as it turned out, the PointSavers rate was available in the app, it just didn’t show up until you clicked through on the 43,000-point price. In other words, if you didn’t click through to view room types, you would never know that The English costs almost 9K fewer points.
In this case, that could make a big difference to someone with a 35K free night certificate and no points to top off the certificate or even more of a difference to someone with a 25K free night certificate (from the old and no-longer-available Marriott Rewards Premier card) since that certificate could be topped off with points to book the PointSavers rate but could not be topped off with enough points to book this property at 43K points per night.
Either way, I wasn’t looking to stay at The English Hotel (sorry, Stephen Pepper), so this didn’t make a difference to me in this specific instance, but it was a good reminder that the Marriott app is not my best tool when researching hotels. Goodness knows how many times I’ve missed out on a hotel that I could have booked because I thought it cost more points than it did.
Of course, even searching via desktop, I don’t often see PointSavers, so I’m not convinced that I’ve missed these many times….but who would know?
Bottom line: when you’re checking Marriott Bonvoy award prices, search on desktop or click through to see the available rooms at hotels that might cost few enough points to be of interest.
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Very interesting. Recently I had the experience that I couldn’t book a Marriott free night cert on the laptop, but it was right there on the app.
Seems like the app is the ONLY way to book a free night certificate. For me at least! They do not populate as an option at all for me on the desktop.
For me, the free nights aren’t populating as an option if I have enough points in my account to cover the stay. The workaround is to make a dummy booking for a later date in order to use up most of my points and then I can book with certs. No idea if that’s the problem you’re having though. Probably not: my issue happens on both desktop and mobile.
That is interesting. I do have 400,000 points in my Bonvoy account. I wonder if the problems are related?
same
@Nick Reyes,
I have a somewhat related but mostly off-topic question. I know you have written in the past about extending Marriott FNC and I wanted to ask something specific to you. I have Bonvoy cards from both AMEX (Canadian versions) and Chase, both of which earn the same 35K FNC. Back in Feb 2023, my Chase issued certificate from 2022 was going to expire and I called Bonvoy three times and eventually got the third agent to extend that cert. by a year. My AMEX issued certificate expires in about 4 weeks and I was trying to extend it as well. So far, I have called 4 times, and spoken to different agents, who have all told me that AMEX is not allowing Marriott to extend FNC issued by them. For the first call, I was surprised to hear that and assumed this may be an agent who doesn’t know stuff. But after 4 calls with 4 different agents, with the same answers, I am starting to wonder if they are indeed right. Do you know more (or anything) about this?
Nick, Is their a particular reason you typically search hotels via the app versus desktop or is it just for convenience? MJ