Starwood Preferred Guest 2013 annual hotel award category reassignments are effective March 5, 2013. You can book hotels for 2013 dates using current rates through March 4, 2013.

218 hotels go up and 48 hotels go down. Starwood Hotels pdf link.

The end of this post contains Loyalty Traveler’s complete list of the Starwood Hotels changing award category ordered by hotel award number from category 1 to 7.

It is common for a few hotels to be added and some of the posted hotels to be removed from the changes list in the final changes.

The announcement and pdf link were posted by SPG representatives on FlyerTalk and MilePoint.

In a consumer-friendly pdf, SPG lists the hotels changing category with geographic descriptors so you can identify where the hotel changes are happening. Hilton and Marriott listed their hotel category changes by brand with no geographic information for country or city other than hotel name.

My contribution to the Starwood pdf is a list of the changes organized by category with State and Country list. I was too lazy to add the city. You can check the SPG pdf link for city names. Read More…

Marriott Rewards announced major hotel category reassignments and a new category 9 level effective May 16, 2013. The changes are severe.

The addition of a category 9 hotel award category is not that big a deal for 2013. There are only 13 hotels moving up from category 8. The bigger devaluation is the loss of category 4 hotels and a general shift to higher hotel award categories.

370 of the 725 Marriott Rewards category 4 hotels currently listed are being reassigned and moving up to category 5. This is a loss of 50% of the hotels in category 4 currently available for Marriott’s MegaBonus promotion free night certificate redemption limited to category 1 to 4 hotels.

Here are my estimates of the number of hotels in each category with the May 16, 2013 changes:

This post is data collection. Read More…

Hilton HHonors Points & Money Awards have variable cash payments even for the same category hotels. Where you stay can result in a large difference between cash amounts paid for each night.The hotels surveyed for this post found HHonors category 6 Points & Money award nights ranging from $68 to $150 per night, in addition to 50% points of Standard award nights.

Hilton HHonors Points & Money awards require only 50% points compared to HHonors Standard award nights. There is not a published table for the cash portion for this award type. There are prevailing rates, however, some hotels have a higher cash portion than typical for the hotel category. Read More…