This is a Voyescape podcast. You can find all of our travel podcasts from around the world at voyescape.com.

Welcome to Freakimilar's Coffee Break, where we focus on a single topic related to miles and points.

And each coffee break is limited to 20 minutes or less or your money back.

On today's coffee break, we're going to be discussing our end-of-year Marriott Elite plans.

If you're into Marriott-Bon-Voy elite status, then you need to be thinking about where you are at this point of the year.

It's getting towards the end of the year.

You have just until the end of the year to earn the number of elite nights required for each level of elite status.

So if you have your eyes on a particular level, you need to look at your current status, how many nights you've earned so far this year,

what you have in the books,

like planned or ready to earn more, and then what is the gap?

And we'll discuss what we're going to do about our own gaps in that case, and also

we'll discuss some shortcuts to get there if you're not quite there.

Absolutely.

So let's talk first about which levels of status are worth targeting or which is worth targeting.

So first of all, you've got several different levels.

There's like a silver level that doesn't give you anything meaningful.

Gold status at 25 nights.

So when you collect 25 elite nights, you get gold status.

That gives you a 2 p.m. checkout at a lot of Marriott properties, probably not everywhere,

even that it's guaranteed. But 2 p.m. most of the time for a late checkout, that's it,

really at gold, a few more points per dollar. Also, I suppose. Platinum status. You're in platinum

at 50 elite nights. And at that level,

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