A devaluation used to be an event. A program published a new award chart, the blogs did the math, members complained, and everyone knew exactly what had changed and when. Marriott Bonvoy removed the award chart, and with it the event. What replaced it is a process — award prices that adjust daily against demand, season, and the property’s own cash rate, with no announcement and no before-and-after to compare.

Across 2026 the cumulative result has been an average increase in the region of 5 to 10 percent, with individual properties moving anywhere from about 2 percent to 16 percent. There was no announcement because, structurally, there is nothing to announce. The system is doing what it was built to do.

Why the Average Understates the Damage

An average award increase is a misleading number on its own, because a point’s value is a ratio and the increase only tells you about the numerator.

The clearest illustration comes from a mid-2026 analysis of Bonvoy award pricing that tracked points and cash on the same rooms across a roughly three-and-a-half-week window between June and July 2026. Award prices rose about 6 percent. The paid rate on those same rooms fell about 1 percent. Points up, cash down: the member gave up roughly 6 percent more points to avoid a bill that had itself gotten slightly smaller.

That is the mechanism worth internalising. A points price and a cash price moving in opposite directions compounds. On the everyday brands where most members actually redeem — the Courtyards and Residence Inns rather than the flagships — the same analysis found points climbing 5 to 8 percent while cash slipped, for a combined hit to cents per point in the 8 to 12 percent range.

Anyone reading only the headline “awards up 6 percent” would have understood roughly half of what happened.

Where the Increases Landed

The distribution is not uniform, and it does not follow the pattern members might expect.

Dynamic pricing has drifted the flagship luxury brands — Ritz-Carlton, St. Regis, JW Marriott, W, Edition — persistently higher. That is the visible, complained-about half of the story.

The less visible half is that the increases also reached the mid-tier properties that make up the volume of ordinary redemptions. A luxury property going up is a redemption most members were never going to make. A Courtyard going up is a redemption they make several times a year.

What a Bonvoy Point Is Worth Now

Third-party valuations converge on a range of roughly 0.7 to 0.8 cents per point in 2026, down from approximately 0.84 cents in 2024. An analysis by FrequentMiler drawing on data from close to three million Marriott redemptions put the median observed value at 0.77 cents per point as of March 2026.

The distinction between those two figures matters. A published valuation is an editorial judgment about what a point should fetch if you redeem it well. A median of observed redemptions is a measurement of what members actually got. When the observed median sits inside the estimated range, the estimates are honest. When it sits below, the estimates are aspirational.

There are still redemptions well above the median. The fifth-night-free benefit on award stays routinely pushes effective value into the 1.00 to 1.40 cents range on longer bookings, because the fifth night is priced at zero regardless of what the other four cost. At luxury properties with strong cash rates, individual redemptions can clear 1.1 cents. Both of those are real, and both require the member to seek them out deliberately.

The Structural Problem With Planning

The practical loss from dynamic pricing is not primarily the 5 to 10 percent. It is that the member can no longer plan.

Under a chart, accumulation had a target. A member could identify a redemption, calculate the points required, and earn toward a fixed number with reasonable confidence that the number would still be there on arrival. The chart was a commitment, and its occasional revisions were the program breaking that commitment in public.

Without a chart, there is no commitment to break. The cost of a redemption is unknown until the moment of booking and can differ materially from one week to the next at the same hotel on the same date. A points balance stops being a claim on a specific future stay and becomes an unpriced holding in a currency the issuer reprices at will.

That is why the fifth-night-free benefit has become disproportionately important to Bonvoy value. It is one of the few remaining mechanics in the program with a fixed, knowable rule.

How to Redeem Against This

Four habits materially change outcomes in a dynamically priced program.

Always price the cash rate alongside the award. The award number in isolation tells you nothing. Divide the cash rate — the one you would genuinely pay, taxes included — by the points required, and only redeem when the result clears a threshold you have set in advance. Something in the region of 0.8 cents is a defensible floor given where the observed median sits.

Redeem sooner rather than later. In a program that reprices continuously and has trended in one direction, holding a balance is a bet against the issuer’s own revenue-management system. That is not a bet with favourable odds.

Concentrate on five-night stays. The fifth-night-free benefit is the single largest reliable value lever left in the program, and it works precisely because it is not dynamic.

Check the same property more than once. Daily repricing cuts both ways. A rate that is bad on Monday can be materially better on Thursday, and there is no cost to looking.

The Honest Verdict

Bonvoy in 2026 is a program where the points are worth less than they were, the decline is gradual rather than announced, and the member has to do arithmetic at the point of booking that a published chart used to do for them.

None of that makes the program worthless — a 0.77-cent median on a currency that many members earn as a byproduct of stays they were making anyway is not a bad outcome. But it does change what the currency is for. Bonvoy points have become a tool for opportunistic redemption, not a savings vehicle. Treating them as savings, in a program that reprices daily and has moved one way all year, is the mistake the structure is designed to encourage.