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 of today, the 2023 Annual Choice Benefits are available for selection, so you’ll want to think about which benefit you’d like to choose if you’ve achieved or are on target to achieve 50 or 75 elite qualifying nights this year.
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.
Note that 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
- Five extra elite qualifying nights
- 40% off a Marriott hotel bed
- A US$100 charity donation
- The ability to gift Silver Elite status to another member
Personally, I’d say the best choice here is the set of five Suite Night Awards, which allow you to request (but not necessarily confirm) an eligible suite 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 to a select suite that the hotel makes available for Suite Night Award upgrades.
Starting five 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 will 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. Certain brands, such as Ritz-Carlton and EDITION, are excluded from Suite Night Awards. Prepaid stays are also not eligible.
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, I still find Suite Night Awards useful in those circumstances when I really want to confirm a suite upgrade, such as when I’m travelling with my partner on a special occasion.
In these instances, I tend to apply Suite Night Awards to give myself the best shot at confirming an upgrade five days in advance, and I’ll fall-back on my 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 in my view is the five extra elite qualifying nights.
These nights will count towards your elite qualification for 2023, not for 2024. 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 US$100 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
- Five extra elite qualifying nights
- 40% off a Marriott hotel bed
- A US$100 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 may make sense to wait until early January 2024 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.
My Strategy for 2023 Marriott Bonvoy Choice Benefits
Given my thoughts as outlined above, I’ve gone ahead and chosen a set of five Suite Night Awards for my 50-night Choice Benefit.
Meanwhile, I haven’t hit 75 elite qualifying nights with Marriott Bonvoy this year yet, but when I do, I’ll most likely wait until early 2024 to finalize my 75-night Annual Choice Benefit of a Free Night Award worth 40,000 points.
That way, the Free Night Award should post to my account with an expiration date of December 31, 2025, giving me two years’ time to redeem the certificate optimally.
Conclusion
The selection period for Marriott Bonvoy‘s 2023 Annual Choice Benefits has opened. If you’ve reached 50 or 75 elite qualifying nights this year, 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 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 in early 2024 in order to extend the validity period through to December 2025.
