I’m always interested in hotel promotions. For starters, it costs nothing to sign up for them and if a hotel chain is going to offer bonus points, I’m going to take them. On a more intellectual level, I think hotel promotions can give an insight into which customers a hotel is trying to convince to stay at their properties. They also can show which customers a chain really doesn’t care much about.
To use some current examples, Hilton’s current promotion awards double points for every stay and triple points if you pay with a Hilton co-brand AMEX card. They just want more people to stay at their hotels and hopefully for some people to sign up for their credit cards.
IHG’s current promotion doesn’t pay off for a single stay and only starts to get valuable after your third or fourth and subsequent stays.
So what about Marriott Bonvoy’s promotion?
The Unlock More promotion was launched on October 29, 2019, and runs until January 14, 2020.
The promotion starts very straightforward. There no award for your first stay. The first award starts with your second stay.
Stay twice to earn 2,000 bonus points.
Since all Marriott Bonvoy members earn 10X points per dollar spent on stays, unless you’re staying at hotels that cost less than $100 a night, this initial bonus isn’t even worth double points.
But what happens once you stay twice at Marriott Bonvoy properties?
Two to three days after your second qualifying stay has been posted, You’ll automatically unlock an additional offer with Unlock More. Your additional offer will appear in your online member account and you’ll receive an email with offer details.
It’s a mystery. You have to stay twice just to find out what your offer will be for additional stays.
Fortunately, sites like Loyalty Lobby have leaked the additional offers for this promotion.
There are many offers available varying from 2,000 points for 2 additional stays to an additional 20,000 points for one additional stay. Honestly, this harkens back to the IHG Accelerate bonuses where the bonus was tied to your account history. Unfortunately, I do not have two hotel stays to waste at a Marriott Bonvoy property to see what offer they are willing to give me.
If you want to sign up for the promotion, here is the landing page.
Final Thoughts
I guess it depends on your situation on how much this promotion appeals to you. If you don’t stay often at hotels, having to stay twice at a Marriott Bonvoy property just to see what offer you’re going to get isn’t that appealing. If you stay at hotels all the time, this might be an offer for you.
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This post first appeared on Your Mileage May Vary
4 comments
Apparently only paid stays apply. I’ve had two award stays with Bonvoy in the past couple of weeks and the app says that I have zero stays toward the promotion. That doesn’t do much to build any loyalty on my part, and it’s not like Marriott has done anything in quite some time to inspire any trust. Pass.
Lifetime platinum with 60 nights YTD got offer of 4,000 worthless points for two more stays. If the objective is to build loyalty, this promo is a major fail. I get Bonvoyed on nearly every stay. No reason to use Marriott at all next year.
just unlocked my promo, it was a 2k for another 4 stays and follow by 2k for each subsequent 2 stays
My offer was 6 additional stays to earn a bonus of 15k points. Being Titanium Elite, my elite bonus is often about half that per stay. It’s also not much more than the 2k bonus offered to unlock the mystery bonus, per stay.
It was a fun little promo, but it’s just unrealistic for them to expect that any significant amount of people will stay more just to earn the bonus, considering the requirement.