I have been dabbling with the idea of creating an award trip to Australia in the next couple months. My lovely friend would like to go Scuba Diving and I would like to go Park Hyatt’ing so Australia is the perfect intersection of the two!
After investigating places to stay near the Great Barrier Reef, I found the Sheraton Mirage Port Douglas Resort, a category 5 SPG resort. I have a few Suite Night Awards I would love to use on a suite upgrade so I was curious to see the upgrade options at this resort.
The only way to view the rooms available for upgrade is to hold a reservation at the resort and have Suite Award Nights in your account. I went ahead and booked a dummy reservation and found two room upgrade options available. In my previous uses of the Suite Night Awards at the Tambo Del Inka and the W Santiago, all of the available room upgrade options were comparable standard suites like a Fantastic Suite versus a Marvelous Suite at the W. In that case, it made sense to request both types of room upgrade options to increase the odds of landing an suite upgrade. What I found at this resort was that neither option was a standard suite. One for better, one for worse.
The base standard award room is shown below.
Your first option is an upgrade of another 108 square feet to a Premium Mirage. This sounds like a nice room but I am not sure I would qualify this as a standard suite.
Your second option is an upgrade of a whopping 1194 square feet! Once again, I am not sure I would qualify this as a standard suite….. because it is explicitly named a Specialty Suite!
While in truth I would be perfectly happy with either room, I will only be submitting a Suite Night Award request for the second option. I find Suite Award Nights quite valuable and would prefer to use them only for standard suites (or greater in this case). Would you use a Suite Award Night for anything less than a standard suite?
About alex
Alex loves to travel and does so a lot. Logging 100,000 flight miles each year over the past 4 years, Alex uses points and miles to power his passion. Alex is continuously striving to experience the far reaches of the globe. In his day job, Alex is a Management Consultant frequently on the road advising Technology organizations. I love thinking about, reading about, and talking about all things travel. Feel free to reach me at pmmalex@gmail.com
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How do you GET Suite Award Nights in the first place – is this one of the new “50 night Platinum” benefits? I can’t remember, since they’re never going to apply to me… :-p
@Marisa – Yes, they’re the 50-night premium.
@Alex – I would use a Suite Night upgrade in some limited cases to guarantee something an Oceanfront room at a beach resort even if I couldn’t get an upgrade to a suite.
Alex – I honestly wouldn’t waste my suite nights at this property. Assuming you’re Platinum since you have the suite nights, and if you’re going in the next couple of months it will be low-season, your chances of getting upgraded are good. Everything at the property is very old and dated. They had just started renovations when I was there. They had changed out the beds in 1/2 the property to Sheraton Sweet Sleeper beds. I got an upgrade to a lagoon villa and it hadn’t been updated in about 20 years. I was at the property for 5 nights, so I actually opted to switch to a standard room that had been partially renovated. New bed, new lighting, but no new carpet.
IMHO – not worth an upgrade if it’s not a renovated room.
The property is nice – huge actually. The restaurant is good, but very, very expensive. Like mega expensive. The property is a little isolated. I’d recommend renting a car (I didn’t because I don’t like driving on the opposite side of the road) and regretted it. Pool is awesome.
You’ll have a great time. Just don’t expect a modern design unless the renovations are completely done 🙂