About Marriott’s Award Chart

In 2022, Marriott got rid of its public award chart. In the past, you only needed to know a hotel’s category (Cat) to know how many points were required per night, which made trip planning much easier. However, Seal the Deal Travels found that Marriott still assigns a hidden category to each hotel. With a little effort, you can still figure out each hotel’s points range.

The relationship between category and required points is shown below. Some individual hotels do not fall within Cat1-9 and require even more points. You could think of these hotels as being in Cat10-Cat17. The most expensive ones require as many as 605,000 points for a single night. That’s enough points to book 4 nights at Cat 9 rates!

How to Find a Hotel’s Category

Most Hotels

To find a hotel’s category, most properties can be checked using the following steps:

  • On Marriott’s website, find the hotel’s award price for a specific night.
  • Find the hotel you’re interested in and click the hotel name (Aloft Orlando Downtown here).
  • In the pop-up hotel summary, go to the hotel’s main page by clicking view hotel website.
  • Note that the URL of this page looks something like https://www.marriott.com/en-us/hotels/mcoak-grand-bohemian-orlando-autograph-collection/overview/
  • Right-click anywhere on the page and select “View Page Source.”
  • In the page source, use ctrl+f and search for “prop_rewards_category_level” to find the hotel’s category. In this example, the hotel is cat 4. Based on the chart above, that means a range of 22,000-55,000 points.
  • If you go directly to the hotel page through a search, the link format appears to be different, and you may not see the category.

Some Special Hotels

If you want to find the category of a Ritz-Carlton hotel, the method above does not work, because all Ritz-Carlton hotels redirect to the same address. That means you can’t identify each specific property’s category this way.

The same process also does not reveal the category here.

I also tried some methods posted online but didn’t have success. Feel free to try for yourself:

Ultra-Luxury Hotels

Using this method, we can also check the categories of some ultra-luxury hotels. These properties require far more points than the standard Category 9 level.

For example, the current highest-category property, North Island, a Luxury Collection Resort, Seychelles, shows an award price of 551,000 points. If you book with cash, it costs 7,243 euros per night, or about $7,500 per night. That gives Marriott points a redemption value as high as 1.33 cents per point.

Its category lookup shows that it is Category 17.

Below are the categories and required points for several other ultra-luxury hotels. Lowest on the left, highest on the right.

Why This Matters

Using Free Night Certificates

By checking a hotel’s category and the corresponding points chart, we can plan our free night certificates more effectively. Common certificates today are worth 35,000 points and 85,000 points, and these certificates can be topped off with up to 15,000 additional points when booking. That means a 35,000-point certificate can be used for hotels costing up to 50,000 points per night, which generally covers Marriott Categories 1-3. An 85,000-point certificate can be used for hotels costing up to 100,000 points per night, which generally covers Categories 1-6.

If you find that a hotel never seems to fall within your certificate’s usable range, it likely means the hotel’s category is already above what the certificate plus the top-off allows. In that case, you don’t need to waste time searching date by date for the lowest rate.

Quiet Devaluation

After hotels stopped publishing an award chart, we could no longer easily tell whether Marriott points were becoming more or less valuable based on award pricing changes. But by using these hidden categories and their corresponding point ranges, we can still track whether redemptions have been devalued.

The table below comes from frequent miler and shows Marriott’s yearly category and award chart changes, along with how the required points have changed. You can see that Category 1 hotels have steadily required more points over time, while ultra-luxury hotels have seen an explosive jump in award pricing.