a deck with a chair and palm trees

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a deck with a chair and palm trees

In September of 2019 the Marriott Bonvoy program officially started using Off-Peak and Peak pricing on top of standard award night rates. Off Peak and Peak award night pricing is where they charge less or more points per award night based roughly on how much the hotel is charging or how full it is for that night. To refresh your memory, here is the Marriott Bonvoy reward night redemption chart indicating the points required for each category for Off Peak, Standard and Peak pricing:

a screenshot of a graph

And now that travel is slowly and I mean really slowly starting up again Marriott has launched a promotion to encourage booking at their hotels by offering Off Peak pricing at roughly 5,500 of their 7,000+ hotels globally. We’re not sure if 5,500 is chosen as that is how many of their properties are actually open for business or if there is another metric for them choosing that amount of hotels. This offer is good for bookings made by June 30 for stays completed by July 31, 2020. Simply log in to your account on Marriott.com and start searching for availability at the hotel of your choice to see it is one offering Off Peak pricing. You will however want to compare cash pricing versus points pricing to see if it is worth redeeming as many hotels are offering some great cash prices right now. For example I found the Kananaskis Mountain Lodge in the Canadian Rockies was pricing as low as C$185 or 40,000 points for the same night – that’s getting under 1/2 Canadian cent per point value which is very low value when you can easily get 1 cent or more. Granted with travel curtailed and the likelihood of jetting off to some far flung destination where hotels are $1,000 per night and getting more value for your points is not likely happening until 2021 you may be inclined to just use up some points now for a stay closer to home and while the value may be less you would be keeping that cash in your pocket.

a close up of text

The other portion of the news released from Marriott today is that all elite members will be receiving free qualifying nights posted to their accounts. The amount of nights will be 50% of the requirement of the elite status level earned in 2019:
 2019 Elite Level  # of nights being credited
 Silver  5 Nights
 Gold  13 Nights
 Platinum  25 Nights
 Titanium  38 Nights
 Ambassador  50 Nights
These additional nights will be added to all elite members accounts by the end of July. As all elite members have already had their status extended to February 2022 these extra nights are a boost to potentially get you to that next elite level. On top of that these nights do count towards lifetime status within the Marriott Bonvoy program.
Members who earned Ambassador Elite Status in 2019 and achieve 100 Elite Night Credits in 2020 are eligible to gift Platinum Elite Status to one individual, e.g. friend or family member. This Platinum status will continue through February 2022. The $20,000 spend is not a requirement of being able to gift – just the 100 nights.
Visit Marriott.com for more details (there isn’t a dedicated landing page for these offers btw)
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