Update 08/26/18: Just a friendly reminder to ask for refunds if your existing books have dropped in cost.
As you should know by now Marriott and SPG are combining in, earlier today the award categories of every property were released from August 1st onwards. 52% of properties will be decreasing in price, previously Marriott had indicated that if you have a booking where the property drops in price on August 1st they would automatically refund the points difference. Unfortunately it looks like that won’t be the case.
If a redemption stay is booked prior to when these new categories go into effect, a member would not automatically receive a points refund should the hotel require fewer points. Please contact us for assistance moving your reservation to new category pricing
— SPG Assist (@spgassist) June 28, 2018
Normally I wouldn’t trust a Twitter account, but this has also been confirmed directly. You’ll notice that at the end they do say ‘please contact us for assistance moving your reservation to new category pricing’. I think the issue is that automating the price difference is too difficult (read: expensive to refund points to everybody), but if you manually ask they’ll do it. In most cases I’d probably just recommend cancelling and rebooking but at some properties that isn’t an ideal situation due to the possibility of award rooms not being readily available.
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