Is Marriott Elite status still worth it? Testing Platinum Bonvoy for upgrades and perks! Part 3!

Is Marriott Elite status still worth it? Testing Platinum Bonvoy for upgrades and perks! Part 3!

Welcome to the third installment in our series of testing Marriott Platinum status. In 2024, we began tracking our stays as Marriott Platinum members, evaluating the status, benefits, and keeping track of things like upgrades, free breakfasts, welcome amenities, and late checkouts. We made a video for the first part of 2024 going over each stay with specifics and later did the same for the second half of the year. In this video, we’ll talk about our experience with Platinum through the first 6 months of 2025. I will summarize our results from 2024 in this video, so you’ll be caught up, but I will link the two previous videos in the description below as well if you want to check them out or pause this video and come back after you’ve watched them. Before we get started, I just want to let you know that we have several videos talking about all aspects of the Marriott Bonvoy program, including these that talk about our experiences with platinum status. We also have videos talking about the value of Marriott points, how to get and use free night certificates through Marriott credit cards, and how to earn elite night credits that count towards status, as well as some lesserk known subjects like transferring Marriott points to airlines. If you’re new to Marriott, we have an overview video as well. I’ll link our full Marriott playlist in the description below. We’re also always making new content, so if you’re interested in travel stuff like this, please consider subscribing to the channel so you’ll be notified when we release new videos, and like this video as well while you’re at it, if you’re so inclined. Now, let’s talk about platinum status. So, to recap why we’re tracking this and why we’re making these videos, my wife and I travel internationally a few times a year and we want to see if Marriott brand loyalty is worth it for us. Being a loyal customer has a cost, basically an opportunity cost. And for us, if we’re going to dedicate ourselves to obtaining status in a loyalty program, we want to make sure it’s worth it for us. We also want to weigh this against competing credit card incentives that we have. We both have Delta cards that give us an annual credit for booking a hotel through their portal, as well as MQDs if you book during a promotion, and Sky Miles for booking as well. We also have MX Platinum cards, which have their fine hotels and resorts program with a $200 annual credit and perks for booking using MX’s portal. There are Marriott properties available in this program, but you don’t earn Elite Knight credits if you book them, and you don’t use your status if you book through American Express. By the way, we have a video on elite night credits, what they are, and how to earn them with Marriott, and I’ll link that below. Also, in some areas we travel, Marriotts are not in a convenient location. We almost always use public transportation. So, we always want to weigh where a hotel is located relative to the nearest train or subway station and where it is relative to the part of the city we want to be close to. Basically, if we’re going to go out of our way to book Marriott hotels, even when they’re not the most convenient or economical option, sometimes we want to make sure the benefits we get are worth it. Now, this is meant to be a test of the benefits that we find useful. Your opinion of these benefits may obviously be different than ours, but I hope you will find our experience helpful. So, we’re interested in late checkout, free breakfast or the welcome amenity, lounge access in hotels that have lounges, room upgrades, the annual choice benefit, which for 2025 we chose five elite night credits, and the location versus non-Marriott hotels. So, just to bring you up to speed, if you haven’t seen our other videos, our 2024 stays can be broken down as follows. We stayed in two hotels in Europe, both of which were in Poland. We stayed in four in Asia, all of which were in Japan. We stayed at the inn at Opryland at Gaylord Hotel in Nashville, Tennessee. And we stayed at the Weston LAX for a total of eight stays for the year in 2024. So, a summary of our experiences for 2024. We got upgrades at six of the eight hotels we stayed at, though we used a nightly upgrade award at the West LAX, so I’m not counting that. Five of the other seven hotels upgraded us without using certificates. Late checkout was always accommodated, though early check-in was hit or miss. We did have a check-in as early as 10:00 a.m. in Japan. However, half of the hotels gave us free breakfast, which was usually in the lounge. We had breakfast at the Weston in LAX because we were there on a Saturday morning. They only offered breakfast 2 days a week or at least that was the case when we were there. And four of the properties had lounges that we were able to use. Okay, so now we’re going to talk about our Marriott stays for the first half of 2025. As I mentioned before, if you want to go back and see our stays in 2024 in more detail, check out the two videos we made for 2024, one for each half of the year, which will be linked in the description below. Also, we do room tours of many of the Marriott properties we’ve stayed in, including several from last year and all the stays I’m about to talk about for 2025. I’ll link the videos for each property below as well if you want to check those out. Okay, so our first stay was in Tokyo at the Aloft Tokyo Ginsza. We stayed here for one night in June of 2024 on an overnight layover where we had to transfer from Narita to Haneda airports. If you’ve seen our previous videos, you’ll know that the AC Ginsa next door to this hotel is one of our favorite places to stay. A lot of which has to do with the location. This area is not only a great place from which to see and explore Tokyo, but also happens to be a great location to use in a situation such as ours where maybe you’re transferring between the two airports in Tokyo, but have a little time to spend around the city and would like to stay somewhere that’s on the way, but also where you can go out and explore a bit. So, upon checking in at this hotel, we were offered a late 400 p.m. checkout. Our flight the next morning was very early, so we did not need it, but we appreciated that it was offered. We were also upgraded to a larger king room, which you can see in our room tour video. It was a great room, and it was a pleasant surprise given how much we love the AC next door. We chose 1,000 points as a welcome amenity instead of breakfast. And breakfast was in fact an option for the welcome amenity, but given our very early flight, it wasn’t an option for us. So, we just took the points and called it good. Next, we stayed at the Sheridan Grand in Sydney, Australia, which is in a great location next to Hyde Park downtown. We stayed in June for one night. This property does have a lounge with what is supposed to be a great view, but we did not visit it while at this hotel. As platinum members, we did have access to the lounge, however, and it is open late until 10 or 11:00 p.m. We were also offered a late checkout at this property, but because we were flying out midm morning the next day, we did not take them up on that. I will say that at this property, there seemed to be a lot of elites. When we checked in, there were several people waiting for the elite desk and even a couple at a line that was supposed to be for titanium and above. and there was always someone at the elite area when we passed through the lobby. Despite this, we were upgraded to a larger king room with a view of the park. Not a spectacular upgrade by any means, but somewhat surprising given how many people seem to have status there. I’m not sure if Australia has a lot of elite members. If you have experience with this, please let us know in the comments below. We chose breakfast as a welcome amenity here, which was served in the restaurant downstairs. It was an excellent breakfast with a ton of options. Definitely on the upper end of Marriott breakfast and our experience. Check out our room tour for more on this hotel if you’re interested. Our next stay was at the Weston in Singapore, again in June and again for one night. This was a property we’ve stayed at before and liked the hotel and location enough to stay here again. We had gold status when we stayed here before and the experience this time was even better. Our flight landed in Singapore at almost midnight, but because we had the option of a 4 p.m. checkout, we decided to stay in this hotel in the city instead of at the Crown Plaza near the airport. More on that in a moment. We accepted and made good use of the 4 p.m. checkout. We were upgraded to a larger corner king room with a great view, which would probably have qualified as a junior or a mini suite in many hotels. It was a great upgrade and a noticeable difference from when we stayed here before. and booked the same category of room. The hotel has a lounge where we had a very good breakfast. We took points as a welcome amenity and had chocolates waiting for us in the room. Now, I want to take just a minute here and talk about the awesome benefit that is 4 p.m. checkout. It’s easy for us to get caught up in lists of loyalty benefits and focus on things like room upgrades or free breakfast, things that on the surface have more tangible value. And this can often lead to a disappointment with the program when upgrades aren’t as frequent or as extravagant as we want them to be. But let’s look at our use of the 4pm checkout in the West and in Singapore is an example for why we love this benefit so much. In this case, as in others in the past, having the 4 p.m. checkout as an option completely changed our stay and allowed us to structure our time in Singapore in a way that made more sense to us. We didn’t arrive at the hotel until about 2:00 a.m. and we were only staying one night because we were only in Singapore for about 30 hours total. Basically almost a really long layover. We wanted to go out to Orchard Road the next morning and without a late checkout, we would have checked out of the hotel at around 9:30 when we left for the morning, had the hotel store our luggage and come back for for it that night after a long hot day in the Singapore sun. We basically would have used the hotel to sleep and that’s it. Instead, with our late 400 p.m. checkout, we left the hotel around 9:30 and went out for the morning, spending a few hours out and about. We then came back to the room about 2:00 p.m. and had refuge from the heat of the day for a couple hours. Then we checked out, had them hold our luggage, and went back out refreshed to the Marina Bay area and a hawker market until later that night. It totally changed our day in Singapore, giving us a place to rest and cool down just when we needed it. And we were able to enjoy our room instead of just sleeping there and leaving early the next day. Because of experiences like this, and we have had many, I would argue that for my wife and I at least, the late checkout benefit alone, especially when coupled with early check-in, makes platinum status worthwhile. This may not be your experience. It really depends on how you travel, I think, but we’ll continue to take advantage of this benefit and be extremely grateful for it. Our last stay in the first half of 2025 was at the Tiad in Nagoya, Japan. It’s an autograph collection hotel. We stayed in June for two nights. We got free breakfast which was in the restaurant. There was a buffet set up and they also brought a menu where you could select one entree which were priced at around $40, though that seemed pretty steep to me. But if you’re into avocado toast with caviar, hey, this might be right up your alley. We were offered and used a 4 p.m. checkout. Similar to Singapore, this benefit was awesome for us since we had a 9:00 p.m. flight. We went out in the morning, did some shopping, then came back to the room and packed for the trip home in the afternoon instead of having to either pack the night before or in the morning before checking out. We were upgraded to a larger king room. I think it was called a premier room, which was an amazing room. Check out our room tour if you’d like to see more. Marriott hotels in Nagoy are quite cheap relative to Tokyo and Osaka, at least where we’ve stayed. And the three we’ve stayed at have been very nice. We have room tours of all three of them if you want to check them out. Our room also had a nice note and some pastries waiting for us when we arrived. And we also got a separate welcome amenity besides the breakfast. We had options of a spa coupon, a champagne coupon, or some points. There’s no lounge at this hotel, though they do have a large sort of patio overlooking the road below the hotel, which is quite nice. Okay, so to summarize these four stays, here are a few of our takeaways. We were given upgrades at all four hotels, though none of them were mind-blowing by any stretch. I know a lot of people get frustrated when they don’t get put in a suite, and we rarely have been. In fact, it felt on this trip like there was a pretty standard upgrade protocol for Platinum members of just bumping us up to a larger or better view version of the room we booked. In three of the four places we stayed, Sydney being the exception, these rooms felt like actual upgrades, even if they weren’t technically higher categories or rooms. We were happy with them. And the room in Sydney was very nice as well. It just seemed pretty similar to the one we had booked. We were offered 400 p.m. checkout at all four of the hotels we stayed in. In both Singapore and Nagoya, the late checkout was of huge value to us, allowing us to come back to the room to rest and escape the heat in Singapore and to pack for our flight home in Nagoya. Free breakfast was available to us and all four hotels we stayed in, though that is not universal with Marriott, even with platinum status. There’s a complicated chart detailing which brands give breakfast to elites in which parts of the world, but suffice it to say that several Marriott brands don’t give breakfast to platinum members. So, platinum status continues to be a good value in Asia and on this trip in Australia. We’ve even gotten some value in the United States. See our videos from last year if you’re curious, but there’s definitely less recognition for status and fewer upgrades. We also talk about the value we’ve gotten in Europe in our other videos. So again, check those out if you’re interested. So that concludes our look at our experiences with platinum status in the first half of 2025. We’re traveling less this year overall than we have in recent years, but I hope these data points have been worthwhile. As a reminder, you can check out our room tours of each of the hotels we talked about here and in our videos detailing our stays in 2024 linked below. If you’d like to be notified when we post new content like this, please consider subscribing. It really helps us out. Thanks for watching.

Is it worth earning Elite status in the Marriott Bonvoy program in 2025? We’ve been testing this out since the beginning of 2024!

This video covers our experiences for the first half of 2025.

See our first video here, which covers the first half of 2024: https://youtu.be/UNiSvkfoLMM
See part 2 of this video series for the rest of the year: https://youtu.be/_KgytUiE-Nc
Should we go for Titanium status?: https://youtu.be/gwSs1b1FtcY

In 2023, we earned Platinum status with Marriott for the first time. We decided to document our stays in 2024 and our experiences with the program, including upgrades, free breakfast, late check out, and other perks, and we’ll show you our results with real examples here!

Credit cards we use to get our Bonvoy points (these are referral links – if you sign up for these cards we may get Marriott points as a referral bonus. These are NOT affiliate links).

Chase Bonvoy (ours is the Boundless):
https://www.referyourchasecard.com/252m/FL38NPBV87
AMEX Brilliant: https://americanexpress.com/en-us/referral/marriott-bonvoy?ref=LESlIMl5nq&XL=MNMNS
AMEX Bonvoy Business: https://americanexpress.com/en-us/referral/marriott-bonvoy-business-american-express-card?ref=LESlIMwSXE&XL=MNMNS

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WHAT TO WATCH NEXT:

An introduction to the Marriott Bonvoy program: https://youtu.be/uVO05wO2y4c

Curious how the Marriott program compares to Hyatt?: https://youtu.be/4sb_OUH84Bs

How much are Marriott points worth? https://youtu.be/IE76IF4_qeQ
Convert Marriott points to airline miles with over 3 dozen airlines! https://youtu.be/NI3bqXmcrNE
How to get free night certificates with Marriott credit cards: https://youtu.be/R0Z2pPGHEuc
Curious about how you get status with Marriott? Watch this video where we explain elite nights in the Bonvoy program and how they contribute to your status:

Is the Marriott Brilliant card from AMEX worth it? https://youtu.be/DFUAn5B7tjo

See the room tours of the hotels in this video here:
The Aloft, Tokyo Ginza: https://youtu.be/Awzu7fxpfTA
Sheraton Grand Hyde Park, Sydney Australia: https://youtu.be/nzWNtpeEjoA
The Westin Singapore: https://youtu.be/6saJDQ70pnA
TIAD, an Autograph Collection hotel, Nagoya, Japan: https://youtu.be/Mo7Qy05jtoQ

Keywords:

Marriott Bonvoy
Platinum
Room tour
Tokyo
Ginza
Sydney
Australia
Singapore
Sheraton
Westin
Nagoya
Japan
Japan travel 2025

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#hoteltour #luxuryhotel #upgrade #points #roomtour #japantrip #japantravel #travel