Marriott has long had a member birthday benefit: on your birthday, you receive one Elite Night Credit (the birthday Elite Night Credit), which can be used to qualify for status maintenance or upgrade. With the Marriott co-branded card, you can earn 15 Elite Night Credits per year, and with the birthday credit that brings you to 16 total—just 19 short of the 35-night requirement for Platinum. If you also get 10 Elite Night Credits from a qualifying hotel stay, you would only need to stay 9 more nights yourself each year to retain status.

Before Marriott merged with SPG, this benefit was very stable and generally did not get missed. But after the SPG merger, these birthday Elite Night Credits have been missed on a broad scale. I still received mine normally last year, but when my birthday came again at the end of November this year, I found it had not been issued.

There are two main ways to request a retroactive posting:

  • Contact customer service directly (phone, email, or Twitter)
  • Register on the Marriott Insiders forum and submit a request

The first option has been shown to be inefficient. Customer service often cannot resolve the issue right away and often requires opening a case for investigation. The only upside is that you may receive 1000 points in Good Will points first, but the credit is very likely not going to be added afterward.

Marriott Insiders is a forum for Marriott members, and it is much easier to submit a late credit request here.

If your SPG account has not yet merged with Marriott and both accounts use the same email, you only need to register one Insiders account and then find CustomerSupport to submit a request

After filling in the basic details, enter any text and set it to request birthday Elite Night Credit

You usually get a reply the next day, and the response is often very generic.

Hi there,

Thank you for reaching out to us here at Insiders. In order for us to look into this on your behalf we need you to reply to this message from your Insiders inbox (not email) and confirm:

1. That your birthday was listed in your account before it occurred
2. That you have had a stay in the last year
3. That you are subscribed to receive all correspondence from Marriott Bonvoy including the News & Program Information, and Offers from our Partners

If you can confirm the above please let us know by replying to this message from your Insiders inbox(not your email) and we will look into adding your birthday Elite night credit.
If your birthday was less than 10 days ago please wait a full 10 days to see if you receive an email with a link to collect your birthday Elite night credit before reaching back out to us to look into it on your behalf.

Please keep in mind this is not a free night stay and credit from previous years cannot be added this year


After you receive this reply, respond in Marriott Insiders confirming that you meet the three conditions and still have not received the credit.

Note that you can only retroactively post the birthday Elite Night Credit missed in the same year.