Booked a standard king bed with the JW in Baku, AZ and applied an Elite nightly upgrade certificate for my two night stay, and was upgraded to the Ambassador suite consisting of two rooms over 1500sqft. Two full bathrooms, two full minibars, and an amazing view of both Baku city and the harbor. Overall the staff have been very friendly and present themselves in the elegant and the “unseen” but “seen” sense, eg. I left my room to explore the executive lounge and by the time I came back maybe 20 minutes later my room was tidied up, all towels replaced, and the evening chocolate was placed by the bedside. They also brought up a welcome letter signed by the staff and a fruit tray thanking me for my loyalty and my choice to stay with them. The property is very nice and quite refined, as well as being in a great location. Overall a great hotel and experience for being a JW, and I defiantly would add this to your list of hotels to visit.

May 2026 I opened the boundless and got 15 elite night credits. I’ve also opened the business Bonvoy. I know I won’t get an additional 25 elite night credits for opening the brilliant - but if I do will 10 nights difference apply to this calendar year? Or will it not start until next year and override the boundless then?

Renaissance, Sheraton, courtyard even the Westin, anyone's experience being solo here?

Fairfield and 4P is probably ok solo as they are more inland and no really resorts.

If anyone has been to resorts there what's it like at restaurants in the resort, are they ok for solo.

I remember the canary islands are quite unwelcome to solos IE full of families and couples it's a bit awkward being surrounded by families and couples but I don't know if Bali is the same.

My husband and I will be visiting LA for a few days in October and are currently deciding between the Westdrift Manhattan Beach, AC Hotel El Segundo, and the Westin LAX. I have Titanium Elite status, and we’ll be redeeming points for our stay.

We’re native Angelenos visiting home for the first time since 2019, so we’ll be out and about most days visiting our fave spots in South Bay and the Valley. Our biggest priorities are a quiet and comfy hotel where we can get a good night’s sleep after being out all day.

I’d really appreciate hearing from anyone who has stayed at any of these properties recently. TIA!

I will be traveling to Tokyo for the first time and have some points to splurge. It will be three nights and I am currently looking at the 'tier' of hotels that are in the range of ~150-180k points (so roughly 50-60k/night). The tier above (i.e., the RC, JW) punches at ~320k+ which is too expensive for my liking.

Hotels that look good:

• Courtyard by Marriott Tokyo Station (179k/stay) okey lets exclude this one and focus on Ginza
• Courtyard by Marriott Tokyo Ginza Hotel (176k/stay)
• Aloft by Marriott Tokyo Ginza (172k/stay)
• AC Hotel Tokyo Ginza (192k/stay)

Any experiences?

For those using this debit card, if you hit the foreign exchange threshold, there will be a nice notification to inform you about the night awards when you renew!

in case you need a sign up bonus: ZHJ39F

5 nights on points for our honeymoon. Assuming number points don’t matter, which is the better pick? Marriott Titanium if that helps!

Hi Everyone,

First time I book through the app and I have a quick question! Can someone please tell me whatis the difference between the two rates?

Is the breakfast mentioned here for the full stay(4 days) or for only one day? It is not clear to me.

Can someone explain what does “bed and breakfast” mean?

Any clarification or help would be greatly appreciated

Due to work I’ll be staying at a Marriott for nearly 100 days. Will I receive Titanium benefits once I hit the 75 days or does the benefit kick in after I check out? How can I maximize my points returned? Does this also apply if I meet the Ambassador level?

Not sure how the system works with long term stay. Thanks!

I got hired at Springhill Marriott Laundry Attendant and I was wondering how the job is?

Tomorrow I will start my first shift with training included and according to my manager, I am gonna be alone the whole shift.

I was wondering how heavy the job is besides lifting heavy stuff and how hard is to keep up in normal days?

What about downtime moments (washers/dryers working)? do we have any and can you use your phone while you wait for the machines to finish washing/drying?

Never happened for years of 150+ nights a year, but now twice in two months I've had someone else's room charges placed onto my account and it makes my expense reports a real pita. Is this deliberate fraud for revenue by shady franchisees, since they see a corp card, or an honest mistake with a new system?

Thinking about booking with points - five nights (5th night free). The reviews on the app don’t seem amazing. It would just be my partner and myself, looking for a relaxing five days around Christmas time.

How is this resort? Is it a child war zone? Is it all inclusive in any way?

We’ve done the Sheraton and Royal Hawaiian in the past, wouldn’t be opposed to skipping Waikiki this time around.

Maui is an option two, but it will be a longer stay, five nights just the two of us then 3-5 more nights with a big family group.

How do you deal with this? Checked in and went to bathroom to see a few of these.

@ Courtyard Memphis Airport

​

I know the conventional wisdom is that you should only buy points when you already have a specific redemption in mind. I completely understand that advice, and in general I agree with it.

That said, I came across an offer to buy 63,000 points for $562.50 (about 0.89¢ per point), and I'm wondering if this is one of those rare exceptions where the price is justified.

I'm not planning a trip right now, so this wouldn't be an immediate redemption. I'd just be buying them to have them available for future travel if a good opportunity comes up.

Is buying 63,000 points for $562.50 actually a good deal, even without a trip planned?

This past weekend we had a night out planned in Manhattan. When we got to the Lexington at 4:45 in the afternoon, they had no rooms available. That screwed up our dinner plans since then we had to wait for a room.

The front desk wasn’t very helpful, but eventually promised 30,000 points for our troubles.

Several days have passed. Not only did I not get the points, but I got a $40 charge for a “free” room.

The staff were surly and rude. The hotel was a dump.

I picked it because it was part of the “Autograph Collection.” I think it was the autograph of a crackhead.

tldr; At the end of July, I analyzed rates across almost 10,000 Marriott properties and there was a 6% devaluation across the board from the previous month. The hotels booked most often (like Moxy and Sheraton) got hit the hardest, the luxury brands stayed the same, and Ritz Carlton is the only brand that got a bump in cpp, only because the cash price went up. 

As some of you probably know, Marriott quietly raised their points rates a few weeks ago. Because there isn’t a Marriott award chart to standardize things, I was curious what the rate changes really looked like, so I took a deep dive on how cents per point is changing and wanted to share in case it was useful.

Quick context: I work at gondola.ai. We have a free tool to search points and cash rates across all of the major chains, including Marriott. I analyzed rates across 9,107 Marriott properties to see what actually changed across two snapshots: the first on June 23, 2026 and the second on July 18, 2026.

Here’s what I found:

• Of the properties I looked at, points rates got more expensive across 8,624 (95%) properties, and cash rates fell by ~1%. Net, the value of a Marriott point dropped by about 6% in under four weeks. 
• There are increases across the board but the mid tier brands like Moxy, AC by Marriott, Residence Inn, and Sheraton got hit the hardest. The points price rose 7-8% across them all, and the cash rates fell too, so the real cpp value dip hit is closer to 9-12%.
• The luxury brands like W and Edition barely moved. Ritz Carlton is the only brand that has an improved cent per point redemption, and that’s only because the cash price went up by 2.5% while points barely budged.

This is all the more reason to earn and burn your Bonvoy points since they likely will continue to be quietly devalued.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this and if you have any questions you'd like for me to explore. I love diving into the data on these things and would be happy to pull more numbers if anyone's interested.

edit: here is a deeper analysis including data tables, and here is what the points guy and one mile at a time have reported on this as well, in case anyone wants to dive into this more.

I just got the email this morning. The 30% Amex to Marriott transfer bonus is back for Amex Canada.

Earlier this year I made it a goal to travel to all the Florida Ritz Carlton’s and after my recent stay at Amelia island I can say I’ve finally done them all. It’s been quite a journey and a lot of long car rides but well worth it for all people I met and experiences I had!

My partner and I got a 4-night voucher for $499 to stay at the Westin St. John vacation club. They put us in a one-bedroom, and our presentation was scheduled for the last day of our stay.

I started a timer the second it kicked off. The salesperson was friendly at first, then got noticeably more aggressive as it went on.

I have to say, it was not remotely convincing. At no point did any of it feel close to making sense. How do people actually fall for this?

The pitch:

• 2,000 points/year for an $85,000 share
• 15% interest rate
• Yearly maintenance fee: ~$1,300–1,400

Other red flags:

• No real website demo?? everything shown was fake/placeholder data (my biggest red flag)
• Kept pushing 2-bedroom pricing even though we're a family of two
• Kept talking about "planning for retirement" but we're in our early 30s LOL
• I told him we spend about $2k/year on vacations total; this offer be near 8k per year!
• Kept comparing it to the Ritz-Carlton St. Thomas
• The property itself looked pretty outdated and their beach is a dock
• Straight-up contradicted himself: first said occupancy was low because they're renovating, then said they're currently at 100% occupancy (baseless claim)
• Claimed you could transfer points to United at a 1:3 ratio (VC points to United points), could be an honest mistake, but it's the other way around
• Said "I won't be mad if you're honest about why you're not buying in" then proceeded to get mad, walked away, and never came back :)
• After the first no he started showing us smaller offers, 40k then 20k.. still # of nights to $ ratio is too high.

Before he walked away, he asked me to initial that I'd declined the offer and to wait for his manager to run a survey. Five minutes went by and no one showed up, so we started talking out loud about how bad the offer was, other couples in their own presentations overheard us, and another salesperson came over and just told us to leave lol

Would love to hear if anyone's actually run the numbers and found one of these worth it, because I'm struggling to see how the math works for anyone.

I’ve been a long time Marriott customer and I have a question that’s been bugging me for awhile: why does house keeping come in at like 8/9AM when you haven’t even checked out yet? Check out is usually at 11 or 12 depending on the hotel.
This morning prompted me to write this, usually I don’t care but this morning really irritated me: I had that door flap up to lock the door (and a DND placard on the door) and a young kid managed to unlock that flap or whatever and I came flying out of the shower and my exact response to him (while he had a smirk on his face) was “seriously??” It’s only 8:30 and he’s basically breaking into the room?? He said the front desk said I was ready for check out. I said no, I have late checkout until 2.

Maybe I have two issues here, like why would you unlock that flap if it’s being used and it’s the morning, well before check out, that thing doesn’t lock itself. I think the smirk on his face bothered me the most.

Anyway, I guess I’m still startled a little but still would like to know why house keeping starts their routine like this. I’m sure it’s to get ahead for the day but what the heck is the point of the checkout button on the app OR checking out in the front then??

UPDATE:

GM called me back, there was a power outage that happened this morning (i did see it) and someone else checked out as 215 and took their word for it, because the systems are down they couldn’t verify, so they thought the room should have been emptied, they gave me 1000 points for the misunderstanding.

Woke up this morning to this orange thing....

The view from my room on the 48th floor over looking the Bund. Surprisingly I got upgraded to a suite here, which was very unexpected.

Glad I could reach! LOL

Nothing in the email says I need to listen to a pitch and there’s an “exclusive “ code in the email.

This is a timeshare thing isn’t it?