Marriott Bonvoy Unpublished Award Chart: How Much Award Nights Cost

A few years ago, Marriott Bonvoy eliminated award charts and hotel categories, and switched to dynamic award pricing. While award pricing can vary, Marriott does still have a secret award chart, and I want to take an updated look at that, in light of the recent devaluation that we saw.

Marriott Bonvoy hotel categories & award costs

Seal The Deal Travels covers how Marriott Bonvoy still assigns hotels categories when it comes to points redemptions, and there’s a minimum and maximum range of award pricing at each of those categories.

It would appear that Marriott Bonvoy uses nine categories of hotels, with the following nightly points ranges (this is of course subject to change):

• Marriott Bonvoy Category 1 hotels cost 5,000-18,000 points per night
• Marriott Bonvoy Category 2 hotels cost 10,000-28,000 points per night
• Marriott Bonvoy Category 3 hotels cost 15,000-36,500 points per night
• Marriott Bonvoy Category 4 hotels cost 22,000-55,000 points per night
• Marriott Bonvoy Category 5 hotels cost 35,000-76,000 points per night
• Marriott Bonvoy Category 6 hotels cost 40,000-88,000 points per night
• Marriott Bonvoy Category 7 hotels cost 50,000-105,000 points per night
• Marriott Bonvoy Category 8 hotels cost 52,000-140,000 points per night
• Marriott Bonvoy Category 9 hotels cost 88,000-152,000 points per night

However, there are several hotels that don’t fall into those ranges:

• The Ritz-Carlton Maldives and St. Regis Maldives cost 108,000-198,000 points per night
• The JW Marriott Masai Mara costs 192,000-236,000 points per night
• The Ritz-Carlton Reserve Zadun, Ritz-Carlton Reserve Nekajui, and St. Regis Red Sea, cost 125,000-212,000 points per night
• The Ritz-Carlton Reserve Dorado Beach costs 163,000-254,000 points per night
• The Ritz-Carlton Reserve Nujuma costs 187,500-327,500 points per night
• North Island Seychelles Luxury Collection costs 443,000-605,000 points per night

So, how do you determine the category for a Marriott Bonvoy property? Do an award search for the hotel that you want on marriott.com. When you’re on the page that shows award pricing for that hotel, right click and select the “View Page Source” button.

That will show a bunch of text that 99% of us can’t make sense of.

You’ll then want to search this page for the word “category” (you can search a webpage by typing ctrl + f or command + f). When you do that, you should see text that reads something like the following:

“prop_rewards_category_level”:”9″

That “9” means that the hotel you’re looking at is a Category 9 Marriott Bonvoy property, and that you can expect to pay anywhere in the above price range.

Does this information actually matter?

When Marriott Bonvoy first introduced dynamic award pricing, many of us wondered what that would actually look like in practice. Would each point be worth a certain amount toward a hotel stay, or would there still be a certain logic to pricing beyond that? These unofficial categories provide some useful insights into Marriott’s pricing logic.

With the awesome work from Seal The Deal Travels, we know that Marriott still has award charts, but:

• The potential cost range for each category has increased significantly
• Some properties are priced outside of those limits, which was harder to do under the old system
• Marriott obviously wants the flexibility to change the pricing limits for each category at any point without having to announce it or make it seem like a devaluation

Marriott Bonvoy’s secret award chart doesn’t somehow change how I redeem my Marriott Bonvoy points. However, it provides insight into Marriott’s award pricing logic, and it’s always good to understand how a program goes about pricing awards. Keep in mind that hotels don’t set their award pricing, but rather Marriott does, based on the costs the program incurs with redemptions.

Bottom line

Despite having officially eliminated award charts, Marriott Bonvoy still put hotels into categories for the purposes of award redemptions. The program just doesn’t want to us to know those details. Fortunately there’s a way to discover this with minimal effort. Furthermore, there continue to be limits to award pricing within each category, which is interesting to see.

What do you make of this unofficial Marriott Bonvoy award chart?