Keeping track of Marriott’s free night awards just got easier! Take a wild guess how many hotels are now in the Marriott Rewards program? I was way off. Marriott Rewards combined program brings together 6,700 hotels. That’s a lot of hotels to keep track of.
Over the weekend I received a bunch of calls and emails from friends and family members telling me they couldn’t sign in to their newly combined Marriott account. If it had only been one or two people I might not have thought much about it. But with this much confusion going on I wanted to dig deeper and see what the issue was.
I hadn’t logged into my own account for a few days, and sure enough when logging into my account after a few failed attempts I realized what the issue was. I’m sharing this just in case you or someone you know is having trouble or is confused. You may want to grab a shot of espresso because this is confusing.
Is anyone else confused by this??
Good morning everyone, I hope you had a great weekend. A few weeks ago, I was in Denver and went to the Front Range Travel Hackers Meetup Group. At the meetup, I met Zac, the founder of TravelFreely, a website he created to track credit card sign up bonuses (deadlines to complete the minimum spending requirements), track credit card annual fees, calculate your 5/24 Score, and make it easy for you to track your credit cards along with your spouse / companion’s credit cards. And by the way, the service is completely free and you can set up your account in a few minutes (unless you have 30+ credit cards like me, in which case, it could take a little longer). Without further ado, here is how TravelFreely works. To get started, sign up for your free TravelFreely account here. Enter your name, email address, and click the Get Started button.
I’ve been on the fence about whether or not to apply for the new Amex SPG Luxury card and I’ve finally decided to pass. I’ve been a long time Amex customer and have had both the SPG personal and business cards for many years. I used them both, and put as much spend on them as I could. For years all my non-bonused spend went on the personal SPG card and the business card saw heavy use, too.
I really appreciated the Sheraton lounge access that came with the business card. SPG was for many years my number one hotel chain and until the SPG/Marriott merger, SPG was always in my top two. I’ve had multiple amazing SPG hotel stays on four continents.
I never got to Platinum status but did maintain Gold year after year and always felt my Gold status was acknowledged in many generous ways. The merger with Marriott was not one I would have voted for, but then my vote didn’t count :) My SPG cards came out of my wallet and my last Sheraton stay was 8 months ago. Continue reading
Good morning everyone, happy Friday! I’m not a huge fan of SPG or Marriott and didn’t give too much thought to choosing a reward package, so I’m far from an expert when it comes to the SPG / Marriott merger. But I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night… But I did just combine my old SPG / new Marriott account with my existing Marriott account, so I wanted to show you the steps and share some of the interesting things about the combination process. First thing first, I signed into my new Marriott account (old SPG account) and it shows that I have 3,495 Marriott Rewards Points, which sounds right, since I did have 1,165 SPG Points in my account. It also shows 2 “Standard Redemption Rate” awards – I’m not sure what those are, but I think they are related to my 2 SPG award stays booked on July 11.
