Marriott Bonvoy members who achieve 50 or 75 elite qualifying nights during a calendar year are entitled to an Annual Choice Benefit, which allows them to choose one of several different benefits that may enhance their Marriott Bonvoy experience.
As a reminder, the 2023 Annual Choice Benefits are available for selection until January 7, 2024. Therefore, you’ll want to think about which benefit you’d like to choose if you’ve achieved 50 or 75 elite qualifying nights in 2023.
Let’s take a look at what Annual Choice Benefits are available for you to pick from.
Select Your Annual Choice Benefit for 2023
You can head to the dedicated page on the Marriott website to complete your Annual Choice Benefit selection.
You’ll be prompted to log in to your Marriott Bonvoy account, and then you can make either one or two Choice Benefit selections depending on which elite night thresholds you’ve crossed.
Once your selections are made, they’re final and cannot be changed. The deadline to make your selection is January 7, 2024; if you haven’t made your choice by then, you’ll receive the set of five Suite Night Awards as a default benefit for both the 50- and 75-night Choice Benefits.
It’s worth noting that Suite Night Awards will be renamed Nightly Upgrade Awards in 2024.
Note that in the case of the 75-night Choice Benefit, it can well be more advantageous for you to wait until early 2024 (i.e., between January 1 and January 7) to finalize your selection, as we’ll discuss below.
Annual Choice Benefits at 50 Elite Qualifying Nights
Upon earning 50 elite qualifying nights in a calendar year, you’ll get to choose one of the following rewards as a Choice Benefit:
- Five Suite Night Awards (which will be renamed Nightly Upgrade Awards in 2024)
- Five extra elite qualifying nights
- 40% off a Marriott hotel bed
- A $100 (USD) charity donation
- The ability to gift Silver Elite status to another member
Generally speaking, the best choice here is the set of five Suite Night Awards (Nightly Upgrade Awards), which allow you to request (but not necessarily confirm) an eligible upgrade on up to five nights’ worth of hotel stays over the upcoming year.
After confirming a hotel reservation, you have the ability to apply Suite Night Awards (Nightly Upgrade Awards) to a select suite that the hotel makes available for Suite Night Award upgrades.
Starting three days before your stay, the system will begin checking with the hotel whether your Suite Night Awards can “clear” into your desired suite upgrade.
If so, your suite upgrade will be confirmed prior to your arrival; however, there’s no guarantee that they’ll clear, and the suite upgrade may still be denied in the end, with your Suite Night Awards being returned to your account.
Each night of your booking will require one Suite Night Award, so you could use your set of five Suite Night Awards towards a single five-night stay, five separate one-night stays, a two-night stay and a three-night stay, etc.
Altogether, the value proposition of Suite Night Awards is somewhat lacking, because they can’t be used to guarantee a suite upgrade after all – they’re simply a more official tool for requesting a suite upgrade than the art of “suite-talking”, but the latter could still net you very impressive results when aiming to score some memorable hotel suites.
Nevertheless, Suite Night Awards are still useful in those circumstances when you’d really want to confirm a suite upgrade, such as when you’re travelling with a partner on a special occasion.
In these instances, you can apply Suite Night Awards to give yourself the best shot at confirming an upgrade three days in advance, and then you can fall back on your suite-talking abilities if the Suite Night Awards don’t clear. And if a Suite Night Award request does clear, you can often suite-talk your way to an even bigger suite!
Aside from the Suite Night Awards, the only other potentially useful benefit is the five extra elite qualifying nights.
These nights will count towards your elite qualification for 2024, not for 2025. So they’d only be useful if they would retroactively qualify you for a higher tier of elite status, or for the purposes of counting towards lifetime elite status.
Meanwhile, a 40% discount on a Marriott hotel bed is a great choice for anyone who was in the market for a Marriott hotel bed (especially considering the prices on some of those things), but pretty worthless for everyone else.
Similarly, you’d be better off making your own $100 (USD) charity donation rather than picking it as a Choice Benefit, since you’d at least get a tax receipt.
And Silver Elite status would be a rather pitiful gift for another member, given the very limited benefits you enjoy as a Silver Elite, not to mention the fact that anyone can earn this status simply by applying for the American Express Marriott Bonvoy Card or American Express Marriott Bonvoy Business Card.
Annual Choice Benefits at 75 Elite Qualifying Nights
Upon earning 75 elite qualifying nights in a calendar year, you’ll get to choose one of the following rewards as a Choice Benefit:
- A Free Night Award worth up to 40,000 Bonvoy points
- Five Suite Night Awards (Nightly Upgrade Awards)
- Five extra elite qualifying nights
- 40% off a Marriott hotel bed
- A $100 (USD) charity donation
- The ability to gift Gold Elite status to another member
Out of these options, the Free Night Award worth up to 40,000 Bonvoy points is the clear winner.
Whereas Suite Night Awards offer potential value that’s not guaranteed, the Free Night Award can be cashed in for a one-night stay that would’ve otherwise cost you either your hard-earned cash or your hard-earned points.
There’s also the ability to top up a Free Night Award with up to 15,000 extra Bonvoy points, so this certificate could potentially be used to book a stay that otherwise costs up to 55,000 Bonvoy points.
Note that, historically speaking, the Free Night Award you get from the 75-night Choice Benefit will carry an expiration date of December 31 in the year after it was selected.
That’s why it makes sense to wait until early January each year to officially make your selection, as long as you aren’t in a rush to use the 40,000-point Free Night Award.
This way, your Free Night Award would have an expiration date of December 31, 2025, rather than December 31, 2024. You’d be giving yourself an extra year’s time to redeem the Free Night Award in optimal fashion.
Similar to the 50-night level, the other 75-night Choice Benefits are rather uninspiring.
Five extra elite qualifying nights may be useful if you’re gunning for Ambassador Elite status at 100 elite nights. Of course, Ambassador Elite also requires spending $20,000 (USD) with Marriott to qualify for, which is a fairly high threshold.
The only other distinct benefit at the 75-night level is the ability to gift Gold Elite status to another member.
But again, Gold Elite isn’t the most useful elite status level in the first place, and it can easily be earned as a perk of signing up for the American Express Platinum Card or American Express Business Platinum Card.
Conclusion
The selection period for Marriott Bonvoy‘s 2023 Annual Choice Benefits is coming to an end. If you’ve reached 50 or 75 elite qualifying nights in 2023, go ahead and make your selection before the deadline of January 7, 2024.
Among the pool of Choice Benefits, the best selections are likely the five Suite Night Awards (Nightly Upgrade Awards) at the 50-night level and the Free Night Award at the 75-night level. For the Free Night Award, it may be optimal to make your selection early each year in order to extend the validity period through to December 2025.
This story originally appeared on princeoftravel
