Recently we wrote about how to tell you have an Mlife offer with no resort fee requirements. Unfortunately, our timing must’ve been a bit poor, because it appears Mlife is rolling out a new offer structure that backs away from one of the obvious ways you can tell, the code starting with a GA.
With a number of changes seemingly coming from this recent revision, let’s take a quick look at what’s happening and how it impacts you.
MGM/Mlife Changes Abound
MGM announced early this year something called MGM 2020, their next generation efforts to generate more profits and restructure their organization. This follows another program a couple of years ago, the “Profit Growth Plan,” which too looked for ways to wring additional performance out of the company.
The short term impact of MGM 2020 has been substantial layoffs throughout the company. Other expected changes include more use of technology to reduce human staffing levels, such as drink-making machines supporting cocktail waitresses instead of human ones. Then there’s surge pricing in retail shops, a way for the company to raise prices quickly by not displaying prices at all and just updating the computer to have higher prices during busier times.
Now, what does this have to do with offers? Well, offers are one expense to the company, in this case a marketing one to drive more customers to the various properties. The new offer setup may be a first step in making changes to the offers to save money.
What’s Changed So Far
Right now, a few changes seem to be in place:
- While offers vary by property, it seems now there’s a universal offer code that links to offers per property. The offers seem a bit more diverse and adjusted than they used to be; for instance, my free room nights offered (in my case, four) were consistently the same for all properties for years, with just the amount of resort credit and, sometimes, freeplay being adjusted. I also had no resort fees at the lowest end properties, Luxor and Excalibur. In the most recent revisions a day has been trimmed off my higher-end property offers, with the rest of the offers seemingly the same. For a booking at a property like Bellagio that’s a reduction of potentially a couple hundred dollars in comp value if I were to redeem now vs. a couple of months ago for the maximium offered.
- One nice change is the switch to a 12-month offer window vs. 6 – you can now use an offer to book a room up to about a year in advance. For those who go annually, this is a nice change as you can begin getting things set up sooner should you wish. Since sometimes offers can evolve over time, as could room availability, having more flexibility can be a good thing for those booking.
- Another change that’s unexpected is you can seemingly use your offer to make more than one reservation. Under the old program, you could only book one offer per monthly cycle, even if you were going to stay multiple times in the same trip. You’d book the first stay in offer window 1, wait until offer window 2 and then book the second segment. The offer no longer disappears once used, like it used to. This meant getting a bit organized and planning your strategy out in advance to ensure you got what you wanted, but now it seems you can just get it done.
- When you do use another offer, it will now not show comped rooms for the days of your stay, and the three days of padding before and after the stay, which is the required gap between stays. This will avoid any accidental misbookings that don’t leave the required gap, putting the offers at risk.
- Since the codes have changed, being able to check for GA no longer works, but the tip about how to test a code to see if fees will be charged still works as a way to confirm if your fees will be waived or not.
So far the changes don’t seem very drastic, and in some cases are actually beneficial, but it remains to be seen if there’s more coming.
Are you a regular Mlife customer? Have your offers been changing recently? Share in the comments!
