All Inclusive Deals Exempt from Marriott Rewards - Why?

Discussion created by davea1 on Mar 17, 2015
Latest reply on Mar 18, 2015 by brightlybob

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I've always thought that one of the primary ideas behind Marriott Rewards was to reward frequent business travelers by allowing them to use their points for a vacation stay. All Inclusive resorts are common in many of the best beach locations in the world and finally Marriott has added some All Inclusive deals to your web site. What's baffling to me is why you don't allow points to be used for All Inclusive reservations. As a minimum you should do a points plus cash option.

One more example of how Marriott doesn't effectively show their appreciation to their frequent business travelers.

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vickisocal Mar 17, 2015 1:06 PM
Once upon a time a handful of Marriott resorts in the Caribbean had an add on all inclusive option. I believe it was 90K points for 5 days for 2 adults.

I suspect that guests buying things on property is the only way resorts make money off reward stays and they asked for this option to be eliminated.
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- davea1 @ vickisocal on Mar 17, 2015 5:13 PM
  Sorry, this doesn't make sense to me. If the resort only made money from guest buying things, they wouldn't be making any money with all inclusive reservations. Moreover, I'd bet that points are actually sent to the hotel as $$ which will net out the same as a cash reservation.
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brightlybob Mar 18, 2015 4:11 AM
There's lots of speculation about how the hotel companies pay the franchisees for redemptions, but the only one we know about for sure is Starwood, due to publicly released litigation papers in a case where Starwood was suing a franchisee. In Starwoods scheme the company paid each hotel on redemptions relatively trivial sums each night that really do little more than cover the out-of-pocket costs of cleaning and servicing the room, UNLESS the hotel is over 95% capacity in which case Starwood then paid far, far more, based on ADR. It emerged during the case that "most of" the major schemes are run this way. In that case Starwood alleged the franchisee was cooking the books to artificially increase occupation rates thereby vastly increasing the sums received from redemptions.

The classic problem with this business model is that points are earned on biz stays, most of which are not at resorts, but redeemed on vacation where resorts are particularly attractive choices. Hence hotels get all the lovely cash while resorts run the risk of pittance-pay redemptions unless they can cross the occupation threshold. F&B sales to their captive audience is one way resorts can extract some profitability from redemption guests to help balance the books.
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All Inclusive Deals Exempt from Marriott Rewards - Why?

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