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North Island, a Luxury Collection Resort in the Seychelles
In March, Marriott added a property in the Seychelles that sells for over $6,000 a night. It’s called North Island.
While not currently available for booking with points, the word from Marriott was that it would be – somehow.
We are closer to knowing how points bookings will work, though the only detail we have so far is “more points.”
How? By updating their terms and conditions to allow for rates over and above the 100,000 charged now for Category 8 hotels on peak days. The added words are “Select properties may have redemption rates in excess of the Category 8 Redemption Rates.”
As reported by Gary Leff, who actually talked to Marriott for confirmation, this is indeed the purpose. His contact responded that this was added for North Island, stating “...in order to price the resort properly for redemptions, the change was made to the terms and conditions.”
How will Marriott Bonvoy Price North Island for Awards?
Sure, we all *hoped* that this might be available for 100,000 points. You can book resorts that go for $2,000 a night, like the St Regis Maldives, so it was worth hoping. But that won’t be the case.
We don’t know what the upcharge might be here. With Hilton, when they introduced the Waldorf Astoria Maldives, quite possibly the most expensive Hilton branded hotel in the world at over $2,000 a night on average (which I can’t wait to review in April!), they created a new category and prices standard villas there at 120,000 Hilton Honors points per night vs. the previous maximum of 95,000 points a night. They have since added a second Waldorf Astoria property in Cabo to that 120,000/night tier - without warning…
Hyatt recently added Calala Island, which sells for over $2,000 a night and is a private island off the coast of Nicaragua. They kept to their top SLH tier and priced that at 40,000 World of Hyatt points per night.
I don’t know what Marriott might do. A pure speculative guess is they might take a play out of the old SPG “All Suites” playbook and price them at 200,000 points a night. But it could be much better – say 125,000 – or it could be even worse.
When I know, I’ll make sure you know too.
Thoughts?
Let me know here, on Twitter, or in the private MilesTalk Facebook group.
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New to all of this? My “introduction to miles and points” book, MilesTalk: Live Your Wildest Travel Dreams Using Miles and Points is available on Amazon and at major booksellers.
