Full transcript of “BONVOYED: How Marriott RUINED Its Loyalty Program”. Click a timestamp to open the video at that moment. Need another video? Use the YouTube transcript generator.
0:00 Marriott bonvoy is in a weird spot over the past 10 years they've taken one of the best point systems and pretty much set it on fire they were right spots but now the program faces the crossroads and to be fair the cards can still make sense but it's definitely tougher to recommend especially if you like premium travel a bit different than our standard videos but today we're looking at the rise and fall of the bonvoy program or another way to put it is how they bonvoy themselves and ruined their own system I do think that this is something that people need to know so big favors to hit the like button to help with the algor them if you know someone that might benefit then share this with them okay let's actually rewind the clock back to 2015 before all of these changes back then there were two programs Marriott and SPG opinions vary drastically before the merger SPG was viewed as the gold
0:46 standard for hotel loyalty especially for credit card and point enthusiasts back then the target value for SPG points or Star points was 2.5 to 3 cents per point the best comparison we have right now is probably high it and even then High is a little bit worse one of the big draws was the earn rate from their cards you get up to 3x back at SPG and 1 X on everything else if you account for the value of the points about 7.5 to 9% back on SPG and 2.5 to 3% back on everything else there were T of benefits redemptions were better and there were less points in the ecosystem meaning that you had less people fighting for spots taking a look at this comment from 2015 the reason SPG points are the best and so valuable is because they're so hard to get the less points
1:31 available in the marketplace makes them more valuable that's why all the perks always available rooms with points all the upgrades and Suites exist another benefit was the stability so everything was pretty predictable and they had an reward chart that people liked also there were no hidden fees on Awards days so Resort fees were waved on redemptions the best part for us is that there were no sneaky Rules by the properties as long as there was a standard room available you could use your points so they actually had a no blackout policy un like just allocating maybe 10% of their base rooms to points back then categories ranged from 1 to 7 and free Knights were from 2,000 points to 35,000 SPG points later on and what ended up being a fair rate was SPG transfer the Marriott at a 1 to3 rate so if we adjust these Point cost it's about 6,000 to
2:18 105,000 Marriot points right now in equivalent value let's look at one of the best redemptions in the past and we'll see how it's aged back then St reges motives was a category 7 under SPG and 30k points per night for High season it was 35k so a bit more in addition they did offer fifth night free on Awards days so if you ended up booking four nights then you get that fifth night for free this and the fact that they had no blackout dates or inventory controls helped a ton doing the math if you were booking five nights and getting the fifth night free that means you were spending about 26,000 points per night this is in contrast to about 2,000 per night back then so 7.7 cents per point for SPG so in total five nights was 130k SPG or about 390k Marriot Elite status
3:04 was also amazing and best parallel is H it right now you get SPG Platinum after either 25 stays or 50 nights and they would upgrade you to the best available room including standard Suites at checkin we'll look at some data points later but very different from what it is right now SPG Platinum also at 4 p.m. guaranteed L checkout and lounge access are breakfast and most of their brands even if you had just gold status you'd had 400 p.m. guaranteed late checkout so a lot of Brands will offer late checkout but they try not to guarantee it and then hotels play games even if you don't care about hotels and you're on team flights it kind of still worked out because you could transfer SPG points over to Airlines at a pretty good rate transfers were one to one and you also get a 5,000 Mi bonus for every 20,000 Point transfer so for example if you
3:50 transferred 15,000 SG points then you'd only get 15,000 airline miles so no bonus there but if you did transfer 20,000 then you get 25,000 Airline miles the normal 20 plus an extra 5K for 25k back then there were a fair number of people who basically only cared about SPG as a pseudo Airline earner card a big reason for this is that most airlines offer 1 x back on everything while the SPG card with that 5K bonus transfer is effectively 1.25x airline miles on everything so pretty much 25% more than you normally get and that adds up main idea of all of this is that it was the gold standard for hotel programs Marriott on the other hand hand was seen as good but not great and the main draw was the footprint and to be fair compared to what it is right now it was
4:36 actually a pretty good program there was an award chart it was pretty predictable and I liked it the hotels were a bit less aspirational outside of maybe Ritz Carlton's but otherwise pretty predictable it was a safe option which is nice when you are traveling speaking of that we actually just finished 3 weeks traveling in Japan ate a lot of great food met a lot of you guys and did a ton of skiing probably the longest vacation that we've ever taken in the main reason I felt safe to do it was due to today's sponsor delete me if you have any social media a lot of your personal information might be floating out there do me a super fast favor search for your first name last name and let's say email or phone number there's a lot of websites out there that track this stuff along with your birth date address and even your relatives address and birth dates this can be a huge risk for
5:22 identity theft and also fraud another issue that's concerning for a lot of people is burglaries so much so that it is common to recommend not posting travel plans or real time vacation pictures and to be fair there are ways to remove the stuff yourself but it can take hours the me makes it super easy and I've been using them for more than a year in that time they've reviewed over 50,000 listings from over 100 data Brokers they do all of this stuff in the background and they also get your personal information removed all without me having to do anything maybe I'm alone here but it's scary to have that information out there on average delete me removes over 2,000 pieces of data in your first two years using them if you want to join me and protect your personal information this year then check out join delet me.com ask sebbi and you use promo code sebbi for 20% off their us consumer plans okay back to
6:09 Marriot their acquisition of Starwood was announced in 2015 and finalized September 2016 for a while the programs remained separate but linked so you could status match between the programs and also transfer points and this was towards the end of 2016 the transfer rate was what was going valueable at the time so one star wood point to three Marriot points I'd argue that this was the Golden Era for both programs linking meant that you could capitalize on a lot of the benefits a lot of people that had Marriott status could match over to SPG and were now getting upgrades people that had a ton of SPG points transferred over to Marriott to buy Marriot packages which was an interesting meta back in the day a common belief is that Marriott didn't want to devalue the program too fast they kind of wanted to treat it like a frog in hot water the merger
6:56 created the world's largest hotel portfolio and on paper a joint program meant more places to earn and also redeem for everyone that was part of the program another big benefit for us is that there were a lot of cards that were in play back then you could pretty much get all of them and there were no issues so a lot of people including myself as well as Mandy ended up pretty much getting every card there also were new cards that were added which helped with even more bonuses in August 2018 Marriot rewards SPG and Ritz Carlon rewards were combined into one unified system unsurprisingly there were a lot of technical problems Marriot essentially merged spg's database into their own platform this led to missing reservations lifetime credits not applying and also account login problems there were still good things though and especially for us there was one now
7:42 unified Award chart and it sounded pretty great hotels would range from category 1 all the way up to 8 but in the short term they would cap into category 7 so anything that would be in category 8 would only cost as much as the category sevens back then it was 60,000 points per night which was amazing that means that you could book some of the best hotels in the world for 60k points think St bries Bora Bora are malds amaha in the Middle East Ritz Carlton Hong Kong and a host of other options summer 2018 all the way up to early 2019 was a magical window for bookings and travel this was also the peak and the beginning of the end at the start of 2019 they announced a new program bonvoy this marked a turning point for their program but also for us as points people category 8 was produced
8:29 and we kind of knew it was coming but now top properties would cost 85,000 points per night so even though it's annoying we knew it was coming and you still had until March 2019 to do bookings at that old rate one issue that started coming up though and is pretty prevalent now is technicalities and limitations putting it a less polite way it's hotels playing games back then spg's policy was very straightforward if a standard room was available for cash you could book it on points Marriott had a similar policy but with a catch hotels were allowed to limit the number of standard rooms that were available for Redemption on a limited number of days this meant that hotels could select a few rooms that were available on points and then say that everything else is not available some more nefarious properties played even more aggressively where they
9:16 would select less rooms to be eligible for that low standard rate I think when we think of standard rooms it's more about size so if it's anything that is the smallest then it should count some hotels though kind of separated it out so if you had a higher floor that's not technically a base room and same thing if it's facing a good view so in their case a standard room was only the low floors and maybe the ones facing west or facing inwards into the hotel putting it another way Marriott was charging more points but not guaranteeing access upgrades also became a lot harder so SPG was very good of upgrades to standard suets in contrast Marriott will tried their best and it Select Suites and hotels were just less upgrade happy in general there also were some problems with cards with the Rebrand to bonvoy so
10:02 first off they were all rebranded but second off there were now a lot more limitations so instead of being able to get the SPG and Marriot cards there were now bonvoy and there were a lot of rules on approvals and intro bonuses so before they change their name you could get all of them and now you could get one or two there were also two sides of it because there were two major Bank programs that were now sharing this one program I don't think that either Bank was really happy with it and there were rules within the terms saying if you got intro bonuses on one side you pretty much couldn't do it on the other side main idea is that if you start in the point space before this merger you could get a ton of cards that were keeper cards with three Knights and you might still have that now if you started after or started right now you're pretty much out of luck and you have to pick a side another disadvantage of this is that it was now
10:48 harder to get a ton of points and if you were trying to do a big fancy Redemption to let's say the mes then you need a ton of points okay let's look at the numbers for the St regious Mal Dives which we've been doing but for this time in section of the program so with the new category eight it was 85k points times 5 nights it' be 425k bonvoy but you do get the fifth night free so only 340k bonvoy points 340k divided by 4 meant that you were paying 68k Bond voy per night 68 isn't bad at all right now but let's compare it to the old SPG program and the old relief program that was a few months before this so a few months back when category 8s only costed as much as category sevens it would be 60k * 4 so 240k and each night would only be 48,000
11:34 points which is crazy with the old SPG program Five Nights with the fif night free would be 120k SPG times 3 which is kind of the conversion rate so 360 konvoy or about 72k per night so technically at this point in time with the 85k points per night it was still better than the old SPG program it was now harder to get points because of less intro bonuses but still viable all of this changed just 6 months later on September 14th 2019 Marriott introduced Peak pricing they had off peak standard and Peak we'll look at the numbers but it was still somewhat defendable on the top range with those category eights that we've been covering if it's off peak then it's 70k per night standard is 85 and then Peak is 100k the argument
12:21 being that you would probably save money if you travel during off seon or maybe shoulder season doing the math here for off peak 70k * 4 280k but fifth night free so about 56k points per night standard is still 68k and Peak is now a bit more expensive so 4 * 100K 400k total but five nights so 80k points per night now we've pushed it over the edge and arguably worse than the old SPG program but just a 10% premium so still fine-ish the argument at the time was that it was supposed to open up more availability but it kind of ended up being a very obvious devaluation one of the big issues is that there wasn't really a rhyme or Rhythm to this pricing and it was very much up to the Hotel this ended up being a lot of guest work and also just checking on r ends which
13:07 wasn't fun 2020 and 2021 were pretty interesting there was a lot of stuff going on in the world and because of that a lot of people were not traveling as much which meant more availability and easier access you had to have points ready to go but now it was your window to burn them and actually find availability to me and most people that was the last her ra and we've kind of been on the downtrend since in the last 3 years we've seen the program get continually kicked and worsen in 2022 it went from award charts to Dynamic pricing Dynamic pricing is the bane of most of our existence because now the price can be anything with award charts you know exactly what you're getting it might be harder to find availability but the price is relatively fixed now it can be based off market dynamics but even
13:53 when there's not demand during offseason price doesn't drop down as much call me crazy but I haven't releasing a good use case of dynamic pricing and I feel like every time I see it it's just a bad outcome the benefit of an award chart is that you know what you're getting and it rewards people that want to do research and find that space Dynamic is supply and demand but it leads to tells playing games back then for top properties the goal was to find sub 100K Knights and hopefully Stitch a few of them together main reason being that there were cards that give you 85k certificates and you could top off of up to 15K points meaning that if you have a certificate and 15K points then you could redeem for up to 100K given how hard it was to get points certificate was the new meta and what you kind of had to do things became infinitely harder but it was still at
14:39 least possible the carrot was still dangling in front of us and we could theoretically still get it you could catch your tail unlikely harder but possible fast forward to right now so 3 weeks ago and we saw Marriot increasing award cost once again and a lot of this was on their top properties a lot of the top ones now cost 150 to almost 200 G points and it just feels Out Of Reach a big issue for us as credit card people is that that 85k certificate is pretty much not viable anymore because even if you stack on 15K it just can't be used for these top properties the carrot that was right in front of us is now gone and to be fair there still is a case for the cards for elite status and for normal travel if you care about things like free breakfast and late checkout the pipe dream of aspirational and premium
15:24 travel though is now dwindling and just feels non-existent funny enough there technically is still an award chart but one that we're not supposed to be privy to because it's on the back end the only reason we even know about this is because people have done the work to figure it out there's a really good post on this on the W travel subreddit the main idea though is that instead of having set prices and let's say three different levels of peak non- Peak and standard you now have bands with a top and bottom so for category one the bottom is 5K points top is 16k and technically now with the update it's 18K on the top end of category 99's it's 88k as the bottom and top before was 132k but now it's 152k which is a 20K jump which is pretty crazy within category
16:11 9es there are also subcategories so kind of 9A and this would include St reges and Ritz Carlton Mal Dives which saw a 20% jump bottom is 108k and before the top was 164 and now it's 198 we've been using St reg just Mal for this video throughout it so let's Contin continue if you're lucky enough to somehow find Five Knights with the bottom band pricing and also have enough points to even do this then 4 * 108k is 432k bonvoy due to that fifth night3 so about 86.4k points per night on the top band before it was 131k per night and top band right now 198k time 4 is 792k fifth night 3 ID 5 is 158.4 th000 points per night if you
16:58 somehow are lucky enough to book at that bottom band it's still a ton of points you by yourself would not be able to get that many it'd probably have to be player one and two and then transferring points in order to even get the fifth night free top band's pretty much non viable given how expensive it is and even if you have the 85k certificates whether top or bottom bend it doesn't matter if you could top off of a bit more points more than 15K then at least it could be argued but right now the certificates are so capped and so hard to use if you're just a city person if you're doing normal travel then fine there are still a lot of use cases that make sense during busy times but if you're looking for aspirational premium travel it's tough best case with the new program right now is 86.4k per night and worst case and still kind of an ideal situation is 158.4 K compared to the old
17:46 pricing of off peak standard and Peak pricing 56 68 and 80k that's almost half the price the worst part about all of this and I hate to admit it is that the math still works out St reges motives is about 2500 per night during peak season so the top band and it's pretty consistent during that whole peak season of November and December Christmas and New Year's is more expensive but that's pretty much always a no-o of points anyways so 2500 divided by 198k points is 1.3 cents per Point our Target for Marriott points is 0.8 and maybe one so 1.3 is technically still really good for low season so during monsoon season it's 1,600 per night divided by 188k points is still 1.5 cents per Point anything above one is good and these technically
18:33 are still good redemptions pretty much exactly the same map for the Ritz Carlton during low season where it costs about 1,600 per night Ritz is surprisingly cheaper for this High season compared to Prior years where Flo around 3K 1745 divided by 198k points is 0.9 cents per Point even though the value technically is there it's just unobtainable for normal people if anything the only people that would have that many points is going to be management consult ANS who travel for a living so travel every week or people who run businesses and put most of their spend on their bond voy cards or I guess people that had the points in the past but didn't have a chance to use their points yet the problem though is that even if you have other transferable currencies from the banks it almost never makes sense to transfer over to bonvoy the rate doesn't really work
19:19 especially if you can get 1.5 cents per Point through portals or through other programs so for example most banks transfer at a 1 to One Rate so 1,000 Bank points would be 1 do bonvoy in most cases Bank programs cash out at a 1 to 1.5 cents towards travel so you might as well book through their portal and not have to waste time looking for availability because value is about the same and technically better with the portal even worse is if you decide to transfer to other programs like hayatt or Hilton so 1,000 Bank points would be 1,000 bonfoy 1,000 Hyatt or 2,000 Hilton without promotions the park high at MES is a step down from the St reges in britz but it's still nice and it's still an option retail price during peak season is half the price about 1,200 room cost is also a lot lower though at
20:04 30k per night and there is availability 1,200 divid 30k is 4 cents per point so if I had one Bank point where I could transferred over to Marriot where get let's say 1.3 or 0.9 cents for that point or I can transfer it over to Hiatt and get 4 cents I'm taking 4 cents for example while the fror Mal Dives is under Hilton Peak pricing is about the same at 2200 you do have to hunt for standard room availability and and be very much on top of it but it is possible to find it and Stitch together multiple nights so for example for the month of November right now as of filming there is one standard room availability on the first if you are going for those type of properties and same thing with flights you want to make part of your routine like you would checking sports scores or like people check in the stock market it sounds
20:50 annoying but if you bookmark things it's about five to maybe 15 seconds every day so in this case One Bank point is to Hilton with nonpromotion rates so 75k bank would be 150k Hilton during promotions it's often times 1 to three so 50k Bank points would be 150k Hilton so 50k and 75k Bank points for the W of foror is still a ton of points but it's a lot better than the Marriott equivalent Marriot with those same bank points would be 100K to 200k call me crazy but I'd rather do two or four nights at the W of fror over one night at The Ritz Carlton or St reges I've been to the St reges it's nice but it's not that nice another major disadvantage is Resort fees for Hilton Diamond and high globalist you avoid these if you are doing award bookings that's not the
21:36 case of marot even if you have top level status like Platinum Titanium or even Ambassador depending on some of these properties it could be an extra 20% and it feels like a tax even if you want to be loyal to marry it main takeaway there still is value with the program but it's more reasonable value rather than outsized and with amazing upside also outside of points and Redemption stuff Elite status choke a pretty big hit one of the big issues of having a very big program with a lot of members is that when you go to hotels you have more people visiting and a lot of people have Elite status making upgrades a lot harder for example for this hotel during this instance 81% of the rooms had someone with fvo gold status or higher more than half the members had BVO platinum or higher which is a lot of people I think you can't blame credit
22:21 cards for the inflation within gold and platinum but for titanium and Ambassador those are pretty much all consultants and business Travelers when you have the biggest chain you have the biggest footprint and Consultants pretty much need to pick it when the Consultants travel even for fun you now have more people who have high status fighting for those same rooms even during less busy times availability for upgrades can be pretty tough because hotels play games and interpret rules differently most of the time it depends on the property policy but even the person that you're talking to another Factor could be management and it's not Marriot proper it's going to be the hotel operator so the one that owns the hotel some of them really don't like giving upgrades at all and kind of ignore Marriot and what they want so they try to upsell if possible
23:06 so even if you are Ambassador you have top level status you spend more than 20K on hotels with them every single year you might not get upgrades because they don't feel like it and you might just get water bottles breakfast is another pain Point Marriott bonvoy probably has the most convoluted breakfast rules of any major Hotel Group and it varies by brand and also region so for example if you're at a courtyard mon your a hotels they don't offer breakfast to platinums instead offer food and beverage credits other ones like Ritz Carlton don't offer breakfast or lounge benefits unless the hotel decides to be nice like the Ritz Carlson Kyoto and to be fair I still have the cards I like Elite status I like staying at the hotels but it went from two thumbs up to okay if anything I'm more bullish on Hilton if you're after upside and
23:52 uncapped fre Knights Heights also great if you want upside and amazing value for your points especially if you do want to transfer from some big Bank programs I still like Marriot and ironically I'm currently staying in one despite this whole video this is an autograph in Salt Lake City pretty cool hotel it used to be an old train station I think my whole thing is I like their hotels they're pretty solid but I feel like they keep ruining their own award program it's fine but it feels like the Glory Days of outsid value is over on that note if you want to learn about cards whether bonvoy Hyatt Bank programs or cash back and you want to support the channel we do have links on the website ask.com and also Down Below in the description box make sure the links are competitive but otherwise it is a huge way to support
24:38 the channel so thank you in advance again thank you to delute me for sponsoring today's video makes it fun to talk about different topics while traveling delet me.com ask promo code seie for 20% off the US consumer plans if you made it at this point leave a red square Emoji because I'm giving them a red card in the comments down below and I try to hard it and also respond three questions what are your thoughts on the program and where it's going what's been your best and worst experience and if you were to leave which program would you go to let me know and everyone else know in the comments down below big favor hit the like button share this but otherwise hope you liked it see you next time
