10 August 2026 · by Jorg
Not one long posting. Eighteen separate arrivals, spread over a decade, three and four nights at a time. The Nagoya Marriott Associa, sitting directly on top of JR Nagoya Station. 135 nights in total.
I have a preferred side of the lift lobby. I know which of the two lounges is worth it on which day, and I know the answer changes at the weekend.
Nobody decides to spend four and a half months of their life in one building. It accumulated, the way most of a working life accumulates, and I only saw the shape of it when I put every stay I have ever logged into one place and looked.
Since 2014 I have stayed in 112 different hotels. I visited 80 of them exactly once. The other 32 I kept going back to, and those 32 hold two thirds of every hotel night of my life.
29% of the buildings, 66% of the nights.
Every hotel I have stayed in, sorted by how many separate times I checked in. Orange is a hotel I went back to, grey is one I saw once. The grey tail is the travel people picture. The orange head is the job.
Second place after Nagoya is a Courtyard in Pangyo, south of Seoul: 17 stays, 98 nights. Third is the Hilton at Schiphol, 12 arrivals and exactly 12 nights, every single one of them the night before a 06:00 departure. Fourth is a hotel in Hsinchu, eleven stays.
That is not a travel pattern. It is a work pattern wearing a travel costume, and it took a decade of data to make it visible.
Cumulative share of nights, hotels ordered by number of arrivals. The marked point is where repeat visits stop and the 80 one-time hotels begin.
Ask me which hotel company I use and I would have said Marriott, and guessed a couple of hundred nights. The log agrees with the guess: 189 nights at properties with the word Marriott on the sign.
Then I rolled up the brands.
Courtyard is Marriott. So is Sheraton, Residence Inn, Four Points, Le Méridien, JW Marriott, Renaissance, Westin, Aloft and Moxy. Eleven names on eleven different signs, one company behind all of them, one loyalty balance underneath. Added together: 565 nights.
Nights at hotels with "Marriott" on the sign, against nights across all eleven Marriott brands I have stayed in. Same company, same balance, 56% of every hotel night of my adult life.
56% of every hotel night of my adult life, inside one company. I did not know that, and I am the one who kept the log.
The reason I did not know it is the interesting part, because it is the same reason your booking history has never told you either.
A confirmation email says "Courtyard by Marriott Seoul Pangyo". It does not say "this belongs to Marriott, and it earns into the same balance as the Sheraton in Hiroshima and the Le Méridien in Taichung". That mapping is not in the email. It has to already exist somewhere, as a curated catalogue of brands, sub-brands and chain families, maintained by hand and kept current as chains buy and sell each other.
Parsing a booking email is a weekend project in 2026. Roughly a dozen people shipped one last year. Knowing what the booking means is a different kind of work, and almost nobody does it, because it never finishes.
I know how hard that mapping is because I got it wrong twice while writing this post, and the second time is the one worth your time.
While pulling these numbers, my own app told me I had 573 lifetime nights with Marriott. That looked high, so I went looking.
The six Marriott brands I could see in my stay list added up to 532. The gap was 41 nights. And there, sitting in my log with exactly 41 nights, was a hotel that belongs to a Best Western soft brand, not to Marriott at all.
532 plus 41 is 573. An exact match. I wrote it up as a defect: the catalogue is filing a Best Western property under Marriott, and quietly crediting a program that never earned those nights.
It was wrong. There was no defect.
That Best Western property had been filed correctly the entire time and contributed nothing to the 573. The 573 was Marriott from top to bottom. What I had actually done was list six brands and silently miss five more: JW Marriott, Renaissance, Westin, Aloft, Moxy. 39 nights. Then a citizenM in Amsterdam that genuinely was filed under Marriott, one night, and a Marriott in Wuhan that had no chain recorded against it at all, one night.
39 plus 1 plus 1 is 41. The same 41. Two unrelated errors, one on each side, happened to be within a night of each other.
The correct answer is 572.
Here is what I want to hand you, and it is the only actual advice in this post: arithmetic closing is not evidence. My confidence came entirely from the sum balancing. I never opened the row. A total that reconciles feels like a total that has been checked, and it has not been. It has only been shown to be consistent with one story you already had in your head. Consistency is not proof. It is the absence of one specific disproof.
If you have ever reconciled a spreadsheet and felt the small relief when it tied out, that relief is the bug.
The real defect turned up later, and it turned up a completely different way. My catalogue was correctly refusing to treat the word "Accor" as a brand name, which is true, Accor is a parent company and not a brand. But having refused it, the code stopped reading and never looked at the hotel's actual name. Four stays at a Novotel in Singapore therefore belonged to nobody. Accor was reading 37 nights when the real figure was 66. IHG was reading 48 against 72.
Nothing about that was going to show up in a sum. It showed up because I compared my number against the number in Accor's own app, from the outside, which is now a job that runs every Monday morning without me.
There is a flattering version of this story. Half my nights in one company, so the status compounds, so the upgrades arrive. That version is true as far as it goes. I hold Lifetime Platinum with Marriott, status that never has to be re-earned again.
But concentration is only half of why, and the other half is the number that surprised me most in this entire exercise.
I have slept 572 nights in Marriott properties. Marriott has credited me with 832.
Marriott nights actually slept, against nights Marriott has credited. My log starts in the same year the account did, so the whole gap is bonus nights from promotions. This pair is on the loyalty ledger basis, which includes private stays, unlike every other figure in this post.
260 nights I never slept. And unlike most gaps between two systems, this one has no ambiguity in it at all: I joined Marriott and Starwood in 2014, which is exactly where my log starts, so there is no earlier history hiding in the difference. Every one of those 260 nights is a bonus night.
They came from promotions. Every few months the big chains run one: register, then stay, and each night counts twice toward status. Registration is free, it takes about thirty seconds, and it is not retroactive. If you did not register before you checked in, the stay earns single and nobody tells you.
Turn that around and it says something uncomfortable about how the game is scored. Assuming they were all straightforward double-night offers, 260 bonus nights means 260 of my 572 real nights were slept inside a promotion I had remembered to click. Nearly half. The other half earned single, in the same hotels, for the same money.
There was a second lever, and it was luck rather than skill. I joined Marriott and Starwood in the same year. When the two programs merged not long after, my elite years merged with them. Lifetime status is not only a night count, it is a night count plus a number of years at status, and I got a run at the years half that my actual decade of travel had not earned yet.
So: the nights came from promotions, and the years came from a merger I had nothing to do with. That is the honest anatomy of a lifetime tier, and neither half is the part people tell you about.
The log is less flattering about the rest. 189 of my nights, 19%, went to hotels belonging to no chain at all, and earned me nothing whatsoever. Several of them were the best rooms I have stayed in. The Nagoya lounge I know so well is a benefit I bought with a decade of choosing the same building over better buildings.
That is the honest conclusion and it is not advice. You probably do not know your own numbers. Your concentration is probably higher than you would guess. Whether it was a good trade is a question you can only ask once you can see it.
Every figure here comes from my own logged stays in Pelgrim, the travel tracker the team and I are building.
Two things are deliberately excluded: private stays, which removes 18, and nights that were not hotels, which removes nine stays with friends and one night in an airport lounge. Counting a friend's spare room as a hotel would have moved the headline figure, and this is not the post in which to do that.
One number sits on a different basis and I am not going to hide it. 565 is public hotel nights at Marriott properties. My own loyalty ledger says 572, because it includes the stays I keep private and applies the program's eligibility rules. Marriott says 832, because Marriott counts promotional bonus nights and my log counts beds. Three numbers, three definitions, all three correct. Reconciling them into one would destroy the only useful thing about having more than one, which is that the distance between them is itself information. In this case the distance was worth a lifetime tier.
One more correction happened before this went out. Nine stays were filed under the wrong country: hotels in Hsinchu, Taichung and Taipei carried China instead of Taiwan. That is a live political dispute and a lot of the travel industry's own reference data carries the same tag, which is exactly why a travel app should not quietly inherit it. Taiwan is where I have flown more than anywhere else. It is filed correctly now, and a check runs weekly to make sure it stays that way.
Finding any of this took asking my own app a question I had never asked it.
We are building Pelgrim, a travel tracker built around a living world map. The brand catalogue behind these charts is not a side quest, it is the product: your stays only mean something once something knows which of those eleven signs share a balance.
The promotion tracking came out of this post. Nobody keeps a list of which promotions they are currently registered for, when the window shuts, and whether the trip they are about to book falls inside it. Your loyalty program will happily let you register and then never mention it again. So Pelgrim's calendar and planner say it out loud: this stay falls inside an active promotion, or, you have one expiring in eleven days with nothing booked in it. That is not a clever feature. It is a checklist, put where the decision actually gets made.
Your data stays yours: EU-hosted, GDPR-native, exportable in full whenever you want, no lock-in.
You can see the map without signing up for anything: open the demo. Then go and count your own hotels. I would bet the building you have slept in most is one you would not have named.
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