It has been nearly two years since Marriott Bonvoy did away with set free night award chart pricing as they made the shift to dynamic pricing for free night awards early in 2022. However, it appears each individual property’s pricing is still governed by what category it falls into in the Marriott Bonvoy program and those categories appear to have min/max points that can be charged with dynamic pricing. This news came to us via Frequent Miler where they ultimately had it come from Seal the Deal Travel.
As both Frequent Miler and Seal the Deal Travel point out, having this knowledge can make it easier to plan your future redemptions using points, free night awards or any combination of them. How so? Seal the Deal did the leg work to see what the minimum and maximum points are being charged per night for hotels that fall into these categories (we’ll detail how to find which category a hotel falls into right after this)
As Archie at Seal the Deal points out, he is pretty confident on the maximum points prices but a little less so on the minimum as those can fluctuate more and are harder to find. No matter, kudos to him for putting in all this work to provide this information. But as Frequent Miler also points out, these numbers are good for right now and they can change at anytime as Marrriot can always change points requirements at they like since these are not published publicly.
How to find a what category a property falls into
To find out which category a property has been assigned by Marriott you need to search for award pricing at the specific hotel you are interested in. Once you are on the page that shows the required points per room per night, right click or two finger click on an Apple track pad to bring up your screen menu and click on View Page Source:
This will show you the HTML markup for the page and on this page you’ll want to search (Ctrl-F or Command-F) for “prop_rewards_category_level”
It is here that you will find that specific property’s Marriott Bonvoy category level. In the case of this example this hotel is a Category 4. You can now cross reference this with Seal the Deals points chart to see what could expect to pay in points for a free night or if you can use a Free Night Award here.
You can get annual Free Night Awards with the Marriott Bonvoy American Express Card and the Marriott Bonvoy American Express Card. Both of them offer an FNA that is good for up to 35,000 points plus you can top it off with up to 15,000 more points. This means you could look at using the combo for a free night of up to 50,000 points which could potentially get you one night at the lowest points level for a Category 7 hotel.
Wrapping it up
Here you have one more tool to add to your toolbox of methods, hacks, and websites to help you in your ever elusive search for rewards! While there is still some legwork on your part as you need to find the category details of each specific hotel at least now you how a reference so that you can plan ahead to see if you have or will have enough points for a future stay at that property.